


When the Moon: Chapter 14 Writing Check-Ins

by Mejhiren



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M, Teasers, Winter Cozies, Writing Check-Ins
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-08-19
Packaged: 2018-05-24 20:04:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 29,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6165094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mejhiren/pseuds/Mejhiren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All the Chapter 14 writing check-ins from Tumblr in one easy place for snooping and catch-up. :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Snow Pounce

**Author's Note:**

> This might be a tremendously silly idea but this chapter has been extra-long in coming and I thought collecting the check-ins into a pseudo-chapter might help tide you all over till the update.

“Greedy gosling,” Peeta whispers, and his voice is thinner than a shadow. His eyes are dazed and dreamlike, and for a moment I wonder whether either of us is actually awake or even really here – but yes, the air is sharp and pure as ice against my face and my thighs are peppered with goosebumps on the sides not bolstered by bearskin, and the world is a gasping, blue-eyed cloud of flushed pink skin and sweet boy-musk and downy milkweed lashes.

“Greedy gosling,” he tries again; a little stronger, but only just. “What are you doing out of your nest? I-I haven’t even started your breakfast yet.”

“I don’t want breakfast,” I inform him. “Not yet. I just want you.”

His eyes go, somehow, wider still. “Well,” he says, a little hoarsely, “here I am.” 

Something crackles and flares in my heart; a fresh pine branch igniting with the love already kindled there and adding to the radiant heat of its glow.

Peeta spreads his arms in a gesture of surrender – I’m still pinning his torso firmly but he could throw me off with very little effort – and asks softly, “Now that you’ve got me, what are you going to do with me?”

I consider this quite seriously for a moment. I want to wrap him up in my fox fur coverlet beside the living room fire and kiss the chill from his nose and cheeks. I want to take his hand and lead him upstairs to my den of deerskin and down, where we’ll burrow together like newborn mousekins, all soft bare skin and eyes closed tightly. I want to sit in his lap, legs knotted around his waist, and toy with his curls, giggling as my small fingers make them bounce and spring back toward his scalp, and finally kiss him squarely on the mouth, right when he least expects it.

I want to roll up his trousers – or better yet, remove them completely – and spend the day lavishing love on what remains of his poor right leg with gentle fingertips and careful, lingering kisses. That much wasn’t a dream – the blunt, smooth knob of bone and warm tender skin nestling like a determined, oversized fledgling in the curve of my palm – and I remember all too well Peeta’s heartbreaking words about returning home damaged, unworthy of his sweetheart’s hand.

_A cripple and a laughingstock. Weak. Maimed. Haunted by living nightmares._

I remember equally well the moment that led to that grief: the glossy wolverine, compact and snarling; his fanged maw closing around Peeta’s powerful calf and wrenching viciously. Wolverines have an angled back tooth to help them effectively tear flesh; they explained this – _showed_ this – in the recap and I left the room, crying so hard that I threw up what little was in my stomach.

“I’m going to put you somewhere you can’t get hurt,” I blurt.

Peeta ventures a small smile and gently brushes a gloved hand against my shivering leg where it brackets his hip. “You’ve found it, I think,” he murmurs. “I can’t imagine a safer shelter than beneath my songbird’s wings. But maybe we could move it someplace a little warmer?”

I cock my head at him, reluctant to relocate, despite the cold. I like this perch; like my boy safe and snug between my thighs. “What did you have in mind?” I wonder, and Peeta reaches shyly between us to unhook the fastenings on his bearskin.

“Ah,” I reply, echoing his smile, and shift a little, scooting back onto his thighs so he can reach all the clasps. Beneath the fur he’s still half in his pajamas, with a gray thermal undershirt above his corduroys. “You’re hardly outfitted for the weather yourself,” I chide lightly, brushing a hand over his ribs, then I tuck in my legs for a moment to let the bearskin fall open and scurry back up to blanket him with my small body.

“Oh, little vixen,” he sighs, curling his arms around me and enveloping us both in a dense cocoon of warm white plushness. “How does this suit you?”

“Very well indeed,” I reply, burrowing deeply into the crooks and hollows of his body, and press my face into the curve of his neck with a happy whuff of breath. “It’s a good day’s hunt when straight out of the den you bag a plump, unwitting gander.”


	2. Fuchs, du hast die Gans gestohlen

The stove is full in no time: a pan of drop biscuits in one of the ovens, one skillet hissing with aromatic crumbles of spicy sausage and another sizzling with bacon, with a third on deck for griddling up “egg in a nest” once everything else is done. I’ve got a bowl of flour and freshly ground black peppercorns waiting to become cream gravy, a heap of potatoes and onions itching to be fried crisp, and four perfect brown eggs circling my griddle-batter bowl, ready for their bread “nests.”

I’m surrounded by luscious smells: the smells of my own cooking; the first real meal I’ve prepared since leaving home, but instead of my mother and sister I’m preparing to feed my sweetheart. My sweet boy, my Peeta, my lonely, silly, lazy gander.

I laugh, a bright and glorious sound fueled by sheer, cascading waves of joy.

I never dreamed I could be this happy, let alone with a barb in my heart where my beloved loves another, but I can and I _am_. This must be what love – or being _in_ love – truly feels like, not the aching and heartbreak and tears of yesterday afternoon in the stable. I feel radiant and foolish all at once, and before I can think twice about it, a song is spilling out of me in merry silver motes, like raindrops caught in leaves in the gentle gust that follows a downpour:

 _Fox, a goose I saw you stealing  
_ _Give it back to me!  
_ _Give it back to me!  
_ _Lest the hunter come to get you  
_ _With his arrows three-ee-ee!  
_ _With his bow and knife and hatchet  
_ _And his arrows three!_

It’s a silly folk song but an uncommon one, even precious: a gift from Granny Ashpet’s father, about whom I know almost nothing. I don’t know his name – Dad always referred to him as “Granny Ashpet’s father,” not “Grandpa" or even "my mama's papa” – or if he was even married to her mother, a Seam girl who died in childbirth. Granny Ashpet was raised by her aunt and grandmother and given their last name but her father often came to see her, at least when she was very young, and by all accounts he adored his little daughter. He was the one who took her to the woods and taught her to hunt while nurturing her love of songs and old tales, things he had shared with her mother.

If ever there was true fairy blood in my lineage it would have come from Granny Ashpet’s father. Even in my father’s least fanciful accounts he sounded like a elfin king from the very heart of the wild woods: a stern, fierce man with green-gold eyes who spoke poetry like _liebchen_ and _liebling_ , words never heard before or since in Twelve, who called his daughter _Aschenputtel_ rather than Ashpet and spoke of magic hazel-trees growing from graves and white doves bearing dresses of silver and gold.

The silly fox-and-goose song I sing now he learned as a child and taught to both Granny Ashpet and later, in one of their rare encounters, my father. He called it “ _Liebes Füchslein_ ” – he knew the whole song in its original fairy-words, strange beautiful words like _Jäger_ (“hunter”), _Dieb_ (“thief”), and _Gänsebraten_ (a savory mouthful of a word meaning “roast goose” and nearly as delicious on the tongue as the dish itself) – but the reason why isn’t clear till the end.

The second verse is macabre but in a light-hearted manner, as the singer warns the thieving fox of what will become of it if it persists in making off with its prize:

 _Hunter swift his bow will draw  
_ _Loose three long quills at you!  
_ _Three long quills at you!  
_ _Off your pelt comes for his fine cap  
_ _And your bones for ste-ew-ew!  
_ _Meat for roasting, blood for sausage  
_ _And your bones for stew!_

The final verse, the favorite of all three generations of singers – four now, including myself – finally identifies the thief as not just any old fox but a small female one. “ _Liebes Füchslein_ ,” Granny Ashpet’s father sang – “dear little vixen” – and usually with a chuckle in his voice, indicating that the singer has a certain measure of affection for the vulpine thief:

 _Little vixen, heed my counsel:  
_ _Do not be a thief!  
_ _Do not be a thief!  
_ _Mouse is goose for such as you are  
_ _And shall cause less grie-ie-ief!  
_ _Keep to mice! Though far less tasty,  
_ _They shall cause less grief!_

My father and I sang this song together countless times in the woods, often adding a plaintive _honk-honk!_ to punctuate a phrase, and laughed till our bellies ached at the image of a small stubborn vixen, her mouth full of goose neck with a desperate snapping bill on one side and a plump quivering body on the other, being forced to relinquish her feast in favor of a field mouse the size of one dainty paw.

 _This goose,_ I silently and solemnly inform Granny Ashpet’s fairy father, Granny Ashpet herself, and my own father all at once, _this plump and lonely gander, is mine, whole and entire. I’m afraid no mouse can compare to this prize and I’m not about to trade him for one. I want a winter’s worth of fairy stories and yellow down to nestle in and a clever beak to nip at my neck and fingers and toes._

I want goslits and kitlings too – this gander’s own sweet and downy younglings, carried inside me and birthed in a nest of silky furs – to eat my foragings and drink my milk, but I’m not about to tell my stern fairy great-grandfather that.

Though now I think of it, he was none too impressed by his daughter's choice of husband – not until Grandpa Asa spoke up to his would-be father-in-law and proved that he wasn’t simply another dirt-poor miner with a scrawny body and a plain face – and he had absolutely no problem with his fierce, stunning daughter exhibiting pride and independence well above her social station, so maybe he _wouldn’t_ take exception to his little vixen of a great-grandchild having designs upon an oblivious gander whose heart is otherwise engaged.

In any case, I abandon further declarations to set the kitchen table, complete with a few fat beeswax candles and pine sprigs stolen from the dining room, and start the song over from the beginning.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Katniss sings is “Fuchs, du hast die Gans gestohlen” (”Fox, you’ve stolen the goose”), a popular German children’s song. My sister learned it in Lutheran day school as “Mr. Fox, I saw you stealing / Steal a goose and run!” (which is how I’ve know it up till now), and this chapter is rife with fox-and-goose references so I desperately wanted to bring in the song; however, because it’s dyed-in-the-wool German I didn’t feel like I could simply have Grandpa Asa or Granny Ashpet (whose origins I envision as being a fusion of Appalachia/British Isles and Native American) just “know” it.
> 
> Enter Granny Ashpet’s mysterious father, who I’ve had in the wings for a while and been aching for an occasion to bring up. This excerpt may or may not give you hints to his identity, but it worked beautifully for him to have a German heritage (though of course Katniss is so far removed that it sounds like fairy-words to her). He may or may not matter later in the game. I’m still contemplating. ;)
> 
> The version Katniss sings is my own invention and I’ll talk about it much more in the eventual endnotes of this chapter. Suffice it to say: when I was comparing German and English versions I discovered (to my delight) that Fuchs (fox) becomes Füchslein (little vixen) in the third verse, and I don’t know if this is in any way deliberate but I was delighted to use it to mine and Katniss’s advantage. :) Any errors regarding the German are the fault of my ignorance and the judicious use of Google Translate.


	3. Peeta Hears Katniss Singing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I'm labeling deleted scenes for a DVD release. ;)

My ears perk up at a sound – the creak of the back door opening, followed by the heavy stamp of snow-packed boots – from the direction of the mudroom and I grin with all my might. My boy is back and his timing is perfect: I’m just scooping the last egg in its sweet griddle-nest out onto a platter – not a plate – heaped high with drop biscuit hillocks drowning in an avalanche of hot sausage gravy, with a valley of crisp-fried potatoes and bacon in-between. _I’ll feed my gander so well he’ll never dream of leaving my den, not even for the prettiest goose in the gaggle,_ I jest silently, and keep singing. He’s going to sneak up on me, I’m sure of it, to catch me up in a hug from behind and perhaps even a nuzzle at my neck, and I need to pretend I didn’t hear him and keep nonchalantly laying the table or he won’t try.

He won’t _really_ surprise me, of course. I doubt he _can_ , not walking on those heavy feet, but I so badly want him to try.

I go to the stove to ladle out a crimson mugful of cranberry cider, deliberately turning my back in anticipation of strong arms and a beloved frosty face burrowing into my nape, and continue idly with my song.

 _Hunter swift his bow will draw  
_ _Loose three long quills at you!  
_ _Three long quills at you!_  

But soon the third verse is done, the table is fully set, and still Peeta hasn’t appeared; in fact, there’s no longer any sound from the mudroom at all. I know he came in the house and there’s no way he could have left the mudroom without me hearing, which means he must still be out there.

My mind darts in twelve terrified directions at once. Peeta took longer outside than I expected; maybe he wore himself out and he’s too tired to come through to the kitchen. Maybe he has a weak heart like Grandpa Asa and he’s sitting on the bench beneath the coat hooks, white-faced and gasping for breath. Maybe he hurt his leg and it took him all this while to make it back to the house – and here I am, singing silly songs and ignoring his pain.

I toss my apron onto the counter and bolt out to the mudroom, my heart stumbling over itself with worry, to find Peeta sitting on the bench, divested of his outer garments but still wearing his boots, leaning back against his bearskin with his eyes closed and breathing slow and deep.

Could he simply be so tired that he fell asleep? It’s very early still and he’s already worked so hard…

Then again, more than one miner’s heart has given out in the process of scooping heavy snow.

“Oh no,” I breathe and hurry over to him, kneeling between his legs and reaching up to cradle his face. “What’s wrong, sweethear – sweet boy?” I whisper, catching myself at the very last second. He can’t just be “Peeta” anymore, soft and sweet though his name is on my tongue, but I can’t begin to think of an appropriate alternative. I can’t call him “sweetheart” or “darling,” to say nothing of “beloved,” and adorable as “lonely/lazy/silly gander” is, it’s hardly a lover’s endearment.

Grandpa Asa persistently called Granny Ashpet _acushla,_ an endearment in his own fairy tongue, long before she had any intention of becoming his sweetheart and it used to drive her crazy. My father addressed my mother that way sometimes too, usually in the dark of night, whispered breathlessly across their pillows, and now and again I’ve heard it tossed between the oldest miners and their wives, but do I dare use it for Peeta?

I abandon this ridiculous query and lean up to peck him briskly on the still-chilly tip of his nose, making him open his eyes with a start.


	4. Tasting Love

“I, um… I used to eat a lot of my mom’s cooking,” he explains in a small, quiet voice. “She’s actually a really good cook but…her meals always left me feeling empty, somehow. Dad could make the same meal the exact same way and it would be totally different. You could taste the affection; it filled you up, somehow.”

“I know what you mean,” I answer with a smile, tipping my face just enough to brush noses with him. “Your food tastes of the most wonderful things, every last bite of it. Things like comfort and laughter and autumn sunsets,” I explain, neatly leaving off the thing I love most. The thing that flows out of him in golden waves and bathes everything in its gentle glow but can never _ever_ belong to me.

He chuckles faintly. “That’s not surprising,” he says. “I mean, it’s a little surprising that you could taste such specific things, not that they were there.”

“Food is like a language with you,” I tell him, leaning back to meet his eyes. “It took me a little while to learn it, but now it’s almost like looking at one of your pictures or hearing you tell a beautiful story.”

His free hand reaches up to brush my cheek. “You’re too clever by half, Katniss Everdeen,” he says softly. “Is that how you did it?”

I shake my head in puzzlement. “Did what?” I wonder.

He takes one beribboned braid between his thumb and forefinger and gently follows the silky red strand from root to tail. “This meal tastes like _happiness,_ ” he murmurs, curling the tail of my braid around his fingertip. “It’s _bursting_ with it, actually; with happiness and affection and…and –” He breaks off with a sharp, strange cry, quickly stifled. “With…other wonderful things,” he says hoarsely.

 _That’s_ _where the extra love went,_ I realize in horror. _There was never a chance to store it away. It spilled out of me and right into his food._

For a brief, mad moment I wonder if I’ve poisoned him somehow. If I’ve drugged or sickened this precious boy by pouring enough love into his food to choke the veriest glutton.

“It tastes like _home_ ,” he goes on, “but…like a home I’ve never known before. A rich and wondrous place,” he breathes, “that might not even exist, or maybe never will.”

My breath catches in something like a whimper because I know what he tasted in this meal; what streamed through my fingertips as they cracked and sliced and stirred and fell like rain in the silver motes of my song: _our_ home – this beautiful house in the woods – but the way that _I_ see it. Pine smoke and cider and hearty rabbit stew, furs and skins and glorious old tales and a wild vixen with fairy blood who loves a golden prince with all her might.

He’s tasting my hunger for him: to hold him close and kiss him breathless, my mouth moving eagerly over every inch of his sweet, soft skin. To share bread and wine and lie together as husband and wife, merging our bodies with breathless, halting tenderness. To give him kits and chicks, kindled and carried in the secret hearth at the root of my belly.

Except he doesn’t know that. The images swirling through each bite – downy fox kits tumbling from eggshells of shimmering pearl, silky-furred goslings birthed from a womb and cradled to a dusky breast, a nest of catkin-studded willow branches threaded with miles of scarlet ribbon and lined with deerskin and furs and dandelion down – are straight out of the strangest folktale.

And he can’t ever be allowed to guess it. I have to guard my heart and hands more carefully, especially in these moments of joyous abandon, lest they betray the full appalling truth and he’s forced to send me away forever.

“It _will_ exist, Peeta,” I vow, thinking of his Seam sweetheart and swallowing back my grief as I press my forehead against his. “One day, very soon. A home where you’re cherished and adored, every last part of you. It’s close,” I soothe, letting a single slender thread of the truth – my love for him – seep through in my voice. “ _So_ close, my sweet boy.”

He leans back with a sad smile to meet my eyes. “I can wait,” he says softly. “I could wait a hundred years if that place lay on the other side of it.”

I try to picture this sturdy Merchant boy cradling a newly hatched kitling in the bowl of a willow-cradle and wish that it wasn’t so easy, nor so heartbreakingly beautiful. “Not half so long as that,” I promise, mentally exchanging the kitling for a black- or golden-haired infant in turn – the likely offspring of his marriage – and finding it no less natural or painful. “And in the meantime I’ll give you as much of it – of that home,” I add quickly, “of that…that _happiness –_ as I can.”

“You’ve already given me _so_ much of it,” he murmurs. “So much more than you realize, Katniss. I think the full measure might well stop my heart.”

I force a clumsy chuckle. “Well, we don’t want that,” I say. “I’ll aim for seventy-five percent happiness.”

To my surprise this makes him laugh in turn, a bright, genuine chuckle that crinkles his eyes at the corners. “You’re nearing eighty already at the _least_ , gosling mine,” he insists. “Throw in a cuddle-nest and it’s a solid eighty-five.”

I laugh heartily and the spell is broken, at least for the moment. “The cuddle-nest is a cert,” I assure him. “This gosling’s breakfast, however, appears to be a doubtful prospect –”

“Come here, you,” he growls playfully and hauls me up into his lap again, bringing my back flush against his chest. “I knew I had the right idea to begin with,” he says, wrapping his arms around my waist like a belt of warm steel. “Now you can have all you want and you get to decide when – or if – I get any more bites.”

“You’ll get bites,” I assure him. “All the bites you could possibly want. I want to keep my toes, after all.”

“I was going to ask about those,” he says. “The only other thing I asked for and you couldn’t be bothered to include them in your menu. Miserly vixen,” he scolds teasingly and I feel his mouth at my right shoulder, taking a mock-bite against the flannel, the way you pretend-gobble at a small child.

The place between my legs pulses faintly and I reach back to cup his downy-curled head and draw it over to my nape. “I knew I should’ve started with your beak,” I murmur and win a ragged sigh in response.

“Not my beak, please,” he whines against the sensitive ridge of my spine. “I need it for gobbling up eggy and biscuits and unwary vixens – and of course, for crowing your praises.”

“Are you a gander, a tom, or a rooster?” I tease, but because I love and want all of the things he just listed to take place, I don’t bother to protest further.


	5. The Gander Catches a Vixen

“I’m a jealous fox,” I tell him. “Jealous the way it used to mean, and I want this gander all to myself.”

In a move worthy of a wrestling champion – not the runner-up – Peeta rolls up onto his side, quickly but carefully, so I’m pinned between his powerful body and the back of the sofa, with one leg caught fast beneath his ribs.

“Has no one ever told you, wild thing,” he murmurs, his face aglow with humor and sheer delight, “that mouse is goose for such as you are and shall cause less grief?”

“Mouse!” I scoff, even as I tug instinctively – and futilely – to free my leg. “Whatever should I do with a _mouse_? The merest mouthful of meat and barely enough fur to warm a single pad of one paw!”

“Ah yes,” he says merrily, his bright eyes gleaming as delight turns to glee. “Your greed has made you the greater fool, vixen, for now _at last_ I shall claim my prize!” He rolls onto his back, pinioning my right leg fully beneath his warm bulk, then he catches hold of my left leg and, bending the knee back toward me, brings my foot to rest on his chest.

“Oho!” he cries, flexing my foot with his strong thumbs to place my toes in front of his face. “What have we here? Five perfect vixen toes! Ripe gooseberries they are,” he proclaims, “or rather, four plump gooseberries – ” he counts them with a fingertip, beginning with the smallest – “and one round little plum!” He licks his lips and waggles his eyebrows at me. “Shall I gobble them all up this very instant,” he wonders giddily, “or shall I begin with a single bite and save the rest for later, as you meant to do with me?”

His breath is hot and moist on my toes and the hem of my nightgown has slid up to bare that leg to the knee. I shake my head, desperate for freedom and for his mouth all at once, and Peeta pounces, drawing my foot down with cupped hands and closing his lips around the tender pad of my little toe with a playful gobbling sound, followed by quick, fluttering strokes with the tip of his tongue.

I squeal and giggle and thrash, tugging wildly at my ankle with both hands, but Peeta’s hold is too strong, and with my other leg pinned beneath him I have no leverage at all. He proceeds to nibble at each of my toes in turn, greedily and with visible relish: his eyes closed, his mouth like a minnow’s – and yet nothing like a minnow’s – and his tongue scaling the breadth of each round toe pad in rapid, hungry laps.

I can do nothing but writhe in his hold and laugh desperately while the place between my legs warms and pulses and aches. There’s a growing dampness there that confuses and frightens me even as it feels _wonderful_ , or like the start of something  _impossibly_ wonderful, and I can’t bear another second of it.

“Stop!” I plead through a frantic little laugh. “Oh, _please_ stop!”

He does, of course – Peeta’s too gentle-hearted to ignore the cries of a trapped wild thing – but he doesn’t release my foot. “Stop when I’ve only just claimed my prize?” he teases, nuzzling my toes with his nose, and he sounds a little out of breath, as though _he_ ’s the one who’s been struggling all this while. “I warned you to eat my beak first, overconfident vixen,” he reminds me, “and see how I have triumphed by your refusal!”

He leans up to press a wet open-mouthed kiss to my big toe and I whimper softly. The place between my legs is half pressed against his thigh because of our pose and I can’t help wondering if rubbing against that solid warmth might appease the strange hunger.

“ _Please,_ ” I beg, because continued devotion to my toes, however exquisite in its way, will only make the ache unbearable, and rubbing against Peeta will only make him recoil in horror, maybe even repulsion. I can’t lose this exquisite new thing we’ve just found together; this place of ganders and vixens, of shared nests and passionate hugs and mouths moving playfully against each other’s skin.

Peeta regards me silently for several moments, searching my face for signs of genuine distress. “Your cause moves me to pity, vixen mine,” he says at last, a little grandly. “I will relinquish all ten toes: these five delectable fruits –” he counts them again carefully with a fingertip – “and the other five I have in keeping –” he rolls his back against the leg beneath him with a grin – “but you must pay me a forfeit for your freedom.”

 _Kisses!_ I think wildly. Kisses are the only forfeit I know of, and one I would gladly pay to be free of this delicious agony. Can Peeta possibly want another kiss from me, let alone so soon?

“Anything,” I promise him in a rush of breath. “Unto half of my kingdom, greedy gander.”

He raises his brows in surprise. “Your domain is vast, little wild queen,” he remarks, “rich with pine and furs and the bounty of fruiting trees, but I crave another treasure – indeed, a greater one.”

My heart beats so fast and fierce against my eardrums that I’m certain I’ll be deaf in a moment. “ _Anything,_ ” I whisper. “Anything you can dream of. I’ll give it freely, whatever you want.”

Peeta gazes at me with a sad sort of disbelief, as though I can’t possibly mean what I’ve said and certainly don’t intend to give him whatever precious thing he wants so badly – a thing I can’t even begin to guess at. What can this boy, who tries to refuse my gifts at every turn, possibly want from me at this moment? What could I possibly give him that he would consider a true treasure?

“I want a song,” he blurts, his expression suddenly and absolutely terrified.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because someone will inevitably ask: no, Peeta does not have a Katniss foot fetish. :/ Obviously, he adores every inch of her and her feet no less than any other part, but this started as a little joke earlier in the chapter and ended up becoming sensual, as is WtM!Everlark’s wont in life.


	6. Writing New Tales of Lonely Ganders and Dusky-Toed Vixens

 

“It’s a good day’s hunt when straight out of the den you bag a plump, unwitting gander.”

Peeta makes a small disgruntled sound; the audible equivalent of a scowl. “Did you just call me ‘fat,’ Katniss?” he wonders, and I giggle against his throat.

“Well, it sounds ridiculous to describe a gander as ‘strong and stocky,’ ” I reply, leaning up to meet his eyes with a grin. “Did you just admit to being captured unawares by a hungry little vixen?”

“Captured, always,” he murmurs, snugging his arms across my back so the bearskin won’t fall open behind me, “but unawares, only once. And anyway, I thought you weren’t hungry,” he says softly.

“Not for breakfast,” I tell him, glinting down mischief, and lick my lips. “But foxes love geese, and lonely ganders best of all.”

Peeta catches his breath, a quick jerk of his chest against mine. “Do they, now?” he whispers.

“It’s a well-known fact,” I reply merrily, and dip my face in a playful mock-nip at his throat, making him gasp. “We vixens are small but mighty and our appetites are legendary. You’re a goner, lonely gander,” I inform him, brushing the tip of my nose against his in a gentle sort of sniff-nuzzle.

“I’ve known that much for a while,” he says, and his voice is more husky than playful. “Do you mean to gobble me up, greedy vixen?”

“Only a little,” I answer. His strange somberness is puzzling but hardly off-putting, not when I’m so deeply entrenched in the game. “It’s going to be a long winter, and you’re a feast of a catch,” I explain. “I think I’ll tuck you away in the pantry and nibble at you at intervals.”

“You’d best start with my beak, then,” he advises, and the playfulness is back in his voice but there’s something else beneath it now, something tugging and heated in both his voice and his eyes that makes my belly clench. “A lonely gander in the larder promises no end of complaining,” he warns softly, “and I might nip at you when you stop by for a bite.”

I trace his “beak” with a fingertip, sweeping down the bridge of his nose, around its fleshy base and the oval of his mouth, then sweeping up again on the opposite side. “Can’t do it,” I tell him cheerfully. “I quite like your beak, I’m afraid, so I think I’ll save that for last. I like the idea of you honking away at me till there’s nothing left of you but a beak,” I tease, “and maybe regular nips are just what I need.”

 _You’re writing new tales, catkin,_ murmurs my father’s voice in my mind, rich with amusement. _The vixen who caught a gander and kept him through the winter – easier to take a bite whenever she grew hungry than to carve him up and store him for the season – and instead she fell in love with his honks and hisses and frightened toothy nips._

“I could manage that,” Peeta concedes, to my surprise, “if you’d be so kind as to lie on the floor once you’ve eaten everything but my beak, so I can still find and nip you without eyes.”

“There’s no need for that,” I assure him. “You can trawl along the floor and nip at my toes like a minnow.”

He grins at the thought. “I could nip at your toes now, if you’d like,” he says impishly, waggling his brows. “Ganders are especially fond of dusky little vixen-toes, you know, and lonely ganders fondest of all.”

I catch my breath in a strange sort of anticipation, a cross between what you feel before tickling fingers descend and a stab of something hot and fierce, like I felt when Peeta briefly sucked on my fingertips beside the fire on New Year’s Day. I envision us in bed together and his curly golden head disappearing beneath the covers in search of dusky toes to nip and suddenly I can’t breathe at all.

Peeta must catch on to my discomfort because his air of mischief fades immediately, supplanted by a faint rosy blush. “Or I could do no such thing,” he adds quickly. “I could make you a winter’s worth of delicious goose-free meals so there would be no need to concern ourselves with nipping each other to death – or a beak.”

He mentions the beak almost hopefully, making me suspect that he’s as fond of our game as I am and equally reluctant to see it end. I pretend to give his proposal thorough consideration but “It’s no good,” I tell him at last. “I mean, it’s a good try, but this vixen needs her winter gander in the pantry. After all, geese supply down as well as meat and bone and I’m such a very small fox. I want a coat of gander-down to keep out the cold.”

“Well, I suppose you could harvest a pinch whenever you come by for your daily nip,” Peeta suggests equably.

 _That’s good,_ my father says in my mind. _The gander is crafty; bargaining for his life. It’ll take far more than a winter’s worth of down pinches to make a coat for even the smallest fox, and he’ll come up with more shrewd delays as the season wears on. “The down must mature a good six months or it will shrivel when plucked” or “Surely it would be better to let the down grow evenly and harvest it all at once.”_

 _And the twist comes in spring,_ he adds, _when you learn that the lonely gander deliberately allowed himself to be captured because he loves the little vixen with all his heart and would rather be eaten by her than live without her._

 _That’s wrong, Dad,_ I retort silently, _not to mention ridiculous. The vixen wanted the gander for food and down and so she tracked him and trapped him. He was clumsy and amiable – and yes, silver-tongued when it came to bargaining – and the vixen, who was lonely too, fell hopelessly in love with her quarry, in opposition to every last screaming fiber of her being, and as the winter wore on she made her own delays for neither eating him nor plucking his fine coat. When spring’s thaw ensued she despaired, for she must make good on her promise and eat the gander, but how could she devour her beloved?_

 _Little Katniss,_ Granny Ashpet’s voice chimes in, _as always, you overlook the obvious. The gander and the vixen love each other and always have, ever since he was a round downy gosling and she a shy and scrawny kit, peering out from the shadows beneath her father’s foreleg. She didn’t hunt him as a meal but as a mate and he willingly gave himself up to his carnivorous sweetheart, content to be eaten if that was all she could offer him. That winter was for wooing, for wild courtship gifts and shy careful preens and nesting, and the spring that followed was for kits and chicks._

“Goslings,” I correct my grandmother out loud, exasperated. “And exactly what sort of mutt-offspring would that union yield? Live-born goslings with silky fur instead of feathers? Downy kits that hatch from eggs?”


	7. Cuddling Up for a Lullaby

I slink down to lie across the sofa, much as Peeta was doing a moment ago, and beckon him back over. There isn’t enough room for us to lie next to each other unless one or both of us is up on our side, but that’s not what I want. “Lie down here,” I tell him, gesturing at the remaining edge of the cushions – and me.

Of course, Peeta would never just lie down on top of me – his eyes go wide at the suggestion – and I scoot blushingly deeper into the back of the sofa, affording him an extra inch or two at the front.

“Here,” I urge, stretching out my arm. “Lay your head on me and I’ll put my arms around you. There’s more than enough room for both of us, honest.”

He sits on the edge of the cushion, eyeing me warily, and I give his shoulders an enthusiastic tug with both hands. There are a few moments of breathy grunts and fumbling and apologies but we finally end up almost exactly as I’d wanted: wrapped snugly in each other’s arms, Peeta lying half beside me, half on top on me, with his hip and legs on the cushions and his cheek on my chest – or nearly. That is, it’s there but almost hovering, like he’s afraid to put the full weight of his head on me.

I suppose my chicken-egg breast makes a mediocre pillow at best.

“Lie _down_ , silly boy,” I chuckle, cupping the back of his head and drawing it firmly toward my shoulder, and he allows it with a deep exhalation, sinking down to rest his face at the base of my throat and warming my neck with his crown of curls.

“That’s better,” I sigh and cradle him as close as I can, leaning up to kiss the top of his head. His hair smells so good that my womb aches.

“A-Are you comfortable?” I croak, rocking him slightly against me. “Can you fall asleep like this?”

“I expect I could die like this,” he says hoarsely. “And I’m a little afraid that I might.”

“Not on my watch,” I reply, perhaps too fiercely for the context, but I’ll abide no suggestion of my beloved dying, let alone in this precious moment when I’ve finally got him so exquisitely close. “Close your little eyes, gosling mine,” I soothe, a tender parroting of his endearment from earlier. “Let me sing you to sleep.”

The words trigger another deep ache, a hunger not merely for Peeta and the act that would unite our bodies – no, our very _beings_ – but also the child that such an act would create. A small yellow-curled boy or black-braided girl, lying between us in my bed of deerskin and furs, begging for just one more story before sleep-time.

 _Gosling mine,_ I echo silently, wistfully, and wish for a half-second that I wasn’t holding Peeta so I could bring a hand to my empty belly.

“This was Grandpa Asa’s favorite song,” I murmur, rubbing my cheek against Peeta’s curls. “It’s a song for a winter’s night: a song about wishing for the impossible while cherishing everything that’s given to you.”

I kiss his head once more, settle back against the pillows, and sing to my sweetheart, my voice soft and low and spilling over with love.


	8. 10K Christmas Teaser

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first hefty chunk of Ch 14, including a few of the scenelets from previous posts. 
> 
> **Proceed with caution: spoiler-laden!**

I wake as I always have since coming to this house: alone in my enormous bed, curled on my side, tucked snugly beneath soft sheets and thick furs, and though I sigh a little at the realization, I’m not surprised, nor even especially disappointed. This burrow of dark wood and deerskin is my bed and I belong in it. At some point in the night Peeta brought me up here and tucked me in, no doubt thinking of my comfort. Surely if we’d slept all night in front of the living room fire, even with an abundance of pillows and fur coverlets – _and_ , I recall with a bright flush across the apples of my cheeks, _the heat and cushion of each other’s body_ – we’d wake with stiff backs and crooks in our necks. Always-considerate Peeta wanted me to wake in comfort; he might even have waited to bring me here till he got up to start the morning’s baking. To be sure, my body remembers the sweet warmth of his body between the furs as though it was taken away only a moment ago.

I perk up a little at the thought. The sky outside my window is catkin-silver; it’s still relatively early, and Peeta might very well have put me in bed simply because he needed to get up and didn’t want to leave me alone in our nest of fire-warmed furs.

There’s a hushed scraping sound from outside my window – a shovel cutting through snow – and I smile slowly. Maybe Peeta simply needed his bearskin and gently relocated the fox kit who was sleeping on it.

My smile sprawls wide and I bury my face deep in deerskin with an elated little giggle.

I love him. I love him. _I love him._

I remind myself firmly, much like a scolding parent who isn’t actually upset in the least with their errant child, that I absolutely can’t continue to think, let alone act, like this. Peeta will catch on eventually – with his keen mind, sooner rather than later – and then all the horrors I’ve imagined, as well as countless others that I haven’t, will ensue, crumbling to pieces this bliss I’ve come to savor; even devour, like steaming spoonfuls of ginger cake soaked with custard.

It’s utterly imperative that I stop grinning like an idiot at the merest thought of Peeta Mellark. If I have any sense remaining I’ll go back to sleep for another hour or two and meet him downstairs for breakfast like every other morning.

I throw back the covers and sit up, bright-eyed and eager as a fledgling.

I glance briefly at my companion’s side of the bed, curious whether he slept here without me and enjoyed the sweets I left for him, and catch my breath at the sight of his pillow – the rabbit-skin one I made for him and sealed with a sweetheart ribbon on New Year’s night. At its center sits the perfect bird’s nest I found on New Year’s Eve and presented with a cargo of golden honey-eggs, but this morning it holds a sleek black tail feather, iridescent even in the low light from the fire. Likelier than not it’s a blackbird’s feather, though it might just as well have come from a mockingjay. After all, my companion has proven himself beloved of the woods and in possession of its rarest and loveliest treasures.

 _Don’t get your hopes up,_ I said. _I think this one is just a common blackbird._

 _A black bird she is indeed,_ he agreed. _I’ve never seen her like, let alone so close, but I think she might be a mockingjay._

My breath stills in a gasp as one last shred of reason adamantly insists that what I’m imagining is complete and utter madness. I know beyond all doubt that Peeta is not my night companion and the absolute proof of it lies in the absence of my red ribbon yesterday. When I gave him the antlers he put on the ribbon I’d tied around them almost immediately, and that wasn’t even a proper New Year’s ribbon. If he’d received any such token from me on the holiday itself he would have been wearing it tied round his sleeve at breakfast yesterday, sweetheart or no.

Oh, _why_ didn’t I give him a proper ribbon on New Year’s? Why didn’t I tie one around that stupid rabbit-skin muffler like I did with my companions’s pillow? Peeta might even have tied it on right there at the fireside, for me to touch and maybe even press with a quick, shy kiss.

Why, oh _why_ didn’t I claim a sweetheart’s kiss for myself?

I envision Peeta bending to brush his soft, sweet mouth against mine and am certain my heart cracks open with grief.

I focus stubbornly on the black feather in its nest and recall my idea of using the little twig-bowl as a place to leave future treats for my companion. I did nothing to communicate this to him, save for presenting the nest on New Year’s Eve with a festive cargo of honey-buttons, but he must share that intention because he’s left a present there himself; another treasure, no less precious than the ribbon-wound orange and the vibrant wintergreen sprig.

I reach across to his pillow – it feels daring; forbidden, almost, to touch his side of our bed while I’m still in my own – and take the silky feather between my fingers, drawing it to my face for a closer look. It’s exactly the sort of present my mysterious woods-beloved companion – not Peeta – would give me.

Scooting out of bed, I press a kiss to the feather and tuck it away in my drawer of precious things alongside the wintergreen sprig and the orange, which I decide to split with my companion tonight, peel and all. _Perhaps my visitor is a bird himself,_ I think, a little madly, _wooed by my newfound gentleness in the woods, and the feather is his own._ Oranges are very precious, of course, but many birds love fruit, peels and rinds and all, and I resolve to ask Peeta if he’s found one that prefers oranges yet. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s tried it already.

“We’d make a fine pair,” I tell my absent companion as I collect the nest from his pillow and carry it to my dresser-top to await this evening’s treat. “Two lonely blackbirds, sharing an orange and a nest.”

I chuckle at the thought. I’m not truly lonely, of course, not living here with Peeta and Pollux and Lavinia, not to mention little Rye and the chipmunk and all the birds drawn in by Peeta’s gentleness and generosity, but it makes a ridiculous amount of sense for my companion to be a wild creature himself, and a bird could find his way to my bed much easier than a lumbering white bear, and with a wintergreen sprig in his beak besides.

I wonder if my bird-companion has lost his sweetheart too. My father told me stories of birds devoting themselves to stone sculptures, a pretty pleasure-boat with a swan-shaped prow, and even a school of minnows, bringing seeds and insects to the water’s edge out of confusion, misguided love, or grief.

“Perhaps we could feather this nest together,” I muse, only half-joking, as I trace the edge of the twig-bowl with a fingertip. “I’ll never be with my sweetheart either. We could fill this nest with speckled pebbles, and maybe if we kept it warm enough, little black and gold nestlings would hatch out, with voices like starlight.”

 _Don’t be silly, Katniss,_ echoes a chiding voice in my mind. _It would take the heat of the sun itself to hatch anything from pebbles, speckled or otherwise._

I turn away from the dresser with a weak laugh. Lavinia’s laid out clothes for me already and I have a hand on the sweater when I become aware of the snow-shoveling sounds once more and go to the window instead, peering down in search of the source. In the dim light I can just make out a bulky white blue-capped form on the edge of the garden, shovel in hand, scooping and hefting heaps of something even whiter. Peeta’s cutting a snow path, but not a really necessary one – to the woodpile, the stable, or even the garden bench. He’s shoveling the path to the woods – the path I take most often on my hunting trips.

The path no one but me really needs.

I love him.

I run headlong down the stairs in my festive New Year’s nightgown, pausing just long enough to clamber barefoot into my fleece-lined boots, though not to tie more than a quick, cursory bow with the laces, and barrel outside, sprinting through the fresh snow like a hare. I don’t slow down as I approach and provoke a muffled, satisfying “ _Oof!_ ” as I broadside Peeta and topple us both into the snow.

We crumple together in a breathless heap of white fur and beribboned black braids, chickadee-patterned flannel and soft corduroy trousers and heavy, snow-packed boots. For an eternity of moments all I want to do is luxuriate in a faceful of frosty bearskin, a radiant cloud of boy-musk and a mouthwatering whiff of yeast, but I push through the bliss, determined, and scramble up to pin my quarry with eager little paws on either brawny shoulder and fierce strong thighs splayed bare across the fur to trap his powerful lower body.

_Mine._

_Yours, little songbird,_ answers an exquisite wisp of a fireside dream. _Always and entirely yours._

I gaze down at a wide-eyed mismatch of outerwear: a jaunty crested stocking cap patterned to resemble a blue jay’s plumage, with two fat yellow curls peeping out on one side; a luminous coat of thick white fur, such as a prince would wear in a winter tale – and a rabbit-skin muffler, sewn by a wild huntress, wrapped snugly around everything from nose bridge down to collarbones. What lies beneath me might barely be human but for a pair of wheat-pale eyebrows and two over-bright blue eyes, lashed about with golden winter grasses.

My mouthless quarry gasps beneath me – from startlement, surely; my weight is hardly sufficient to put any sort of pressure on his precious lungs – and I pounce, covering everything I can reach with merry kit-kisses and blissful beak-nuzzles. A blue-crested forehead and black-strapped cheeks; a lush, silky expanse of panting gray-brown rabbit fur and dense goose down, concealing a hundred delights – then, impatient and ravenous, I tug down the fur barrier with greedy paws and kiss nose, cheeks, and chin, all flushed and warm and delicious with both boy-musk and rabbit-musk, and even duck my head to nuzzle eagerly at his throat and the tender underside of his jaw.

Silky black ropes woven through with scarlet fall in my face and I toss them out of the way. _So much to kiss,_ I think giddily, _even with lips forbidden me,_ and at a thought I scoot back up to rub my nose and cheekbone against that soft, sweet mouth, back and forth again. A kit’s kiss, followed by a daring vixen’s: a firm, fierce poke of pursed lips in the shallow indent at one corner of his mouth.

I grin down at my gaping sweetheart and do it all over again, this time in gosling-fashion, with quick happy beak-pecks everywhere, finishing with a giddy patter of peep-like kisses deposited squarely on the end of his nose before sitting up and triumphantly regarding my prize.

_Mine. Mine. Mine._

_Always, always, always._

“Greedy gosling,” Peeta whispers, and his voice is thinner than a shadow. His eyes are dazed and dreamlike, and for a moment I wonder whether either of us is actually awake or even really here – but yes, the air is sharp and pure as ice against my face and my thighs are peppered with goosebumps on the sides not bolstered by bearskin, and the world is a gasping, blue-eyed cloud of flushed pink skin and sweet boy-musk and downy milkweed lashes.

“Greedy gosling,” he tries again; a little stronger, but only just. “What are you doing out of your nest? I-I haven’t even started your breakfast yet.”

“I don’t want breakfast,” I inform him. “Not yet. I just want you.”

His eyes go, somehow, wider still. “Well,” he says, a little hoarsely, “here I am.” 

Something crackles and flares in my heart; a fresh pine branch igniting with the love already kindled there and adding to the radiant heat of its glow.

Peeta spreads his arms in a gesture of surrender – I’m still pinning his torso firmly but he could throw me off with very little effort – and asks softly, “Now that you’ve got me, what are you going to do with me?”

I consider this quite seriously for a moment. I want to wrap him up in my fox fur coverlet beside the living room fire and kiss the chill from his nose and cheeks. I want to take his hand and lead him upstairs to my den of deerskin and down, where we’ll burrow together like newborn mousekins, all soft bare skin and eyes closed tightly. I want to sit in his lap, legs knotted around his waist, and toy with his curls, giggling as my small fingers make them bounce and spring back toward his scalp, and finally kiss him squarely on the mouth, right when he least expects it.

I want to roll up his trousers – or better yet, remove them completely – and spend the day lavishing love on what remains of his poor right leg with gentle fingertips and careful, lingering kisses. That much wasn’t a dream – the blunt, smooth knob of bone and warm tender skin nestling like a determined, oversized fledgling in the curve of my palm – and I remember all too well Peeta’s heartbreaking words about returning home damaged, unworthy of his sweetheart’s hand.

_A cripple and a laughingstock. Weak. Maimed. Haunted by living nightmares._

I remember equally well the moment that led to that grief: the glossy wolverine, compact and snarling; his fanged maw closing around Peeta’s powerful calf and wrenching viciously. Wolverines have an angled back tooth to help them effectively tear flesh; they explained this – _showed_ this – in the recap and I left the room, crying so hard that I threw up what little was in my stomach.

“I’m going to put you somewhere you can’t get hurt,” I blurt.

Peeta ventures a small smile and gently brushes a gloved hand against my shivering leg where it brackets his hip. “You’ve found it, I think,” he murmurs. “I can’t imagine a safer shelter than beneath my songbird’s wings. But maybe we could move it someplace a little warmer?”

I cock my head at him, reluctant to relocate, despite the cold. I like this perch; like my boy safe and snug between my thighs. “What did you have in mind?” I wonder, and Peeta reaches shyly between us to unhook the fastenings on his bearskin.

“Ah,” I reply, echoing his smile, and shift a little, scooting back onto his thighs so he can reach all the clasps. Beneath the fur he’s still half in his pajamas, with a gray thermal undershirt above his corduroys. “You’re hardly outfitted for the weather yourself,” I chide lightly, brushing a hand over his ribs, then I tuck in my legs for a moment to let the bearskin fall open and scurry back up to blanket him with my small body.

“Oh, little vixen,” he sighs, curling his arms around me and enveloping us both in a dense cocoon of warm white plushness. “How does this suit you?”

“Very well indeed,” I reply, burrowing deeply into the crooks and hollows of his body, and press my face into the curve of his neck with a happy whuff of breath. “It’s a good day’s hunt when straight out of the den you bag a plump, unwitting gander.”

Peeta makes a small disgruntled sound; the audible equivalent of a scowl. “Did you just call me ‘fat,’ Katniss?” he wonders, and I giggle against his throat.

“Well, it sounds ridiculous to describe a gander as ‘strong and stocky,’ ” I reply, leaning up to meet his eyes with a grin. “Did you just admit to being captured unawares by a hungry little vixen?”

“Captured, always,” he murmurs, snugging his arms across my back so the bearskin won’t fall open behind me, “but unawares, only once. And anyway, I thought you weren’t hungry,” he says softly.

“Not for breakfast,” I tell him, glinting down mischief, and lick my lips. “But foxes love geese, and lonely ganders best of all.”

Peeta catches his breath, a quick jerk of his chest against mine. “Do they, now?” he whispers.

“It’s a well-known fact,” I reply merrily, and dip my face in a playful mock-nip at his throat, making him gasp. “We vixens are small but mighty and our appetites are legendary. You’re a goner, lonely gander,” I inform him, brushing the tip of my nose against his in a gentle sort of sniff-nuzzle.

“I’ve known that much for a while,” he says, and his voice is more husky than playful. “Do you mean to gobble me up, greedy vixen?”

“Only a little,” I answer. His strange somberness is puzzling but hardly off-putting, not when I’m so deeply entrenched in the game. “It’s going to be a long winter, and you’re a feast of a catch,” I explain. “I think I’ll tuck you away in the pantry and nibble at you at intervals.”

“You’d best start with my beak, then,” he advises, and the playfulness is back in his voice but there’s something else beneath it now, something tugging and heated in both his voice and his eyes that makes my belly clench. “A lonely gander in the larder promises no end of complaining,” he warns softly, “and I might nip at you when you stop by for a bite.”

I trace his “beak” with a fingertip, sweeping down the bridge of his nose, around its fleshy base and the oval of his mouth, then sweeping up again on the opposite side. “Can’t do it,” I tell him cheerfully. “I quite like your beak, I’m afraid, so I think I’ll save that for last. I like the idea of you honking away at me till there’s nothing left of you but a beak,” I tease, “and maybe regular nips are just what I need.”

 _You’re writing new tales, catkin,_ murmurs my father’s voice in my mind, rich with amusement. _The vixen who caught a gander and kept him through the winter – easier to take a bite whenever she grew hungry than to carve him up and store him for the season – and instead she fell in love with his honks and hisses and frightened toothy nips._

“I could manage that,” Peeta concedes, to my surprise, “if you’d be so kind as to lie on the floor once you’ve eaten everything but my beak, so I can still find and nip you without eyes.”

“There’s no need for that,” I assure him. “You can trawl along the floor and nip at my toes like a minnow.”

He grins at the thought. “I could nip at your toes now, if you’d like,” he says impishly, waggling his brows. “Ganders are especially fond of dusky little vixen-toes, you know, and lonely ganders fondest of all.”

I catch my breath in a strange sort of anticipation, a cross between what you feel before tickling fingers descend and a stab of something hot and fierce, like I felt when Peeta briefly sucked on my fingertips beside the fire on New Year’s Day. I envision us in bed together and his curly golden head disappearing beneath the covers in search of dusky toes to nip and suddenly I can’t breathe at all.

Peeta must catch on to my discomfort because his air of mischief fades immediately, supplanted by a faint rosy blush. “Or I could do no such thing,” he adds quickly. “I could make you a winter’s worth of delicious goose-free meals so there would be no need to concern ourselves with nipping each other to death – or a beak.”

He mentions the beak almost hopefully, making me suspect that he’s as fond of our game as I am and equally reluctant to see it end. I pretend to give his proposal thorough consideration but “It’s no good,” I tell him at last. “I mean, it’s a good try, but this vixen needs her winter gander in the pantry. After all, geese supply down as well as meat and bone and I’m such a very small fox. I want a coat of gander-down to keep out the cold.”

“Well, I suppose you could harvest a pinch whenever you come by for your daily nip,” Peeta suggests equably.

 _That’s good,_ my father says in my mind. _The gander is crafty; bargaining for his life. It’ll take far more than a winter’s worth of down pinches to make a coat for even the smallest fox, and he’ll come up with more shrewd delays as the season wears on. “The down must mature a good six months or it will shrivel when plucked” or “Surely it would be better to let the down grow evenly and harvest it all at once.”_

 _And the twist comes in spring,_ he adds, _when you learn that the lonely gander deliberately allowed himself to be captured because he loves the little vixen with all his heart and would rather be eaten by her than live without her._

 _That’s wrong, Dad,_ I retort silently, _not to mention ridiculous. The vixen wanted the gander for food and down and so she tracked him and trapped him. He was clumsy and amiable – and yes, silver-tongued when it came to bargaining – and the vixen, who was lonely too, fell hopelessly in love with her quarry, in opposition to every last screaming fiber of her being, and as the winter wore on she made her own delays for neither eating him nor plucking his fine coat. When spring’s thaw ensued she despaired, for she must make good on her promise and eat the gander, but how could she devour her beloved?_

 _Little Katniss,_ Granny Ashpet’s voice chimes in, _as always, you overlook the obvious. The gander and the vixen love each other and always have, ever since he was a round downy gosling and she a shy and scrawny kit, peering out from the shadows beneath her father’s foreleg. She didn’t hunt him as a meal but as a mate and he willingly gave himself up to his carnivorous sweetheart, content to be eaten if that was all she could offer him. That winter was for wooing, for wild courtship gifts and shy careful preens and nesting, and the spring that followed was for kits and chicks._

“Goslings,” I correct my grandmother out loud, exasperated. “And exactly what sort of mutt-offspring would that union yield? Live-born goslings with silky fur instead of feathers? Downy kits that hatch from eggs?”

“Katniss,” interjects Peeta’s voice quietly, “what are you talking about?”

I shake my head to clear it and peer down at my boy, whose eyes are soft and bright with something like fascination – no, _wonder_ – and I realize what I just said…and the implications thereof. “A folktale!” I blurt, frantically and a little too loud. “The oldest ones always had people marrying animals and different animal species marrying each other like it was the most natural thing in the world, and somehow they always had babies. Dad told me a few tales like that but I never understood how – _things_ – were supposed to work. How…”

I trail off, hot and mortified beneath Peeta’s gaze. He nodded in understanding when I mentioned the folktale but that strange, bright softness still illumines his eyes. “H-How a gander and a vixen could marry,” I fumble out. “I was thinking about a tale where that happens –” I neatly sidestep the fact that it was a brand-new tale that I just invented in my head with the help of my dead father and grandmother – “a-and trying to figure out what sort of young they would have.”

“Kitlings,” he says suddenly. “Downy kits that hatch from eggs.”

I frown, thoroughly nonplussed by this response, and he goes on, “Or goslits – your live-born goslings with silky fur instead of feathers. The gander could feed the goslits plants and things and the vixen could nurse the kitlings. They…they could share protective duties,” he says, coloring fiercely beneath my gaze, “a-and teaching the babies how to swim and hunt, but…it could work, Katniss,” he concludes in a small, soft voice. “It sounds kind of perfect, actually.”

I envision myself naked in a broad nest of fur with an armful of downy, freshly hatched kitlings yipping for milk and a lapful of silky newborn goslits peeping for katniss – for tender stalks and leaves and blossoms, maybe a small tuber or two – and have to bite down on my lip to hold back a keening cry. “It does,” I whisper. “It sounds _so_ nice.”

Peeta steals a hand from my waist to brush my cheek. “We could write that story,” he murmurs, and blushes darker still. “I-I mean,” he amends quickly, “we both love old tales and I like to draw and paint. We could make a storybook of your folktale for our – for the future,” he says.

My mouth drops open, as much in captivation as surprise. Books – books not printed, approved, and issued by the Capitol – are rarer than gold. It wasn’t always so, I’m told, but in this day and age if anyone owns a book that didn’t originate in the Capitol, likelier than not it’s handwritten and hand-bound and precious beyond price, like my family’s plant book. Hundreds of years ago, my father said – in much the same manner as he talked about princes and fairies and castles – beautifully illustrated books were common and, impossible as it is to believe now, both accessible and inexpensive. Even a child as poor as I was would have a generous handful of picture-books; secondhand and tattered, perhaps, but all their own nonetheless. Our imaginations took the place of such illustrations, of course, but I always wished that there could have been a picture of my grandmother’s cinder-lass namesake in her pretty red dress and matching dance-slippers or my father’s wily, winsome, lucky namesake, merry and dashing in his magic boots with a mourning dove on his shoulder and a pail overflowing with gold at his feet.

“That would be _wonderful,_ ” I whisper, ignoring for the moment that in order for this to happen, I have to decide how the tale goes and tell it to Peeta, all the while pretending that it’s an ancient story that has nothing whatsoever to do with me or my feelings for him. “But it would be so much _work_ –”

“There are few things I would rather devote my time to than drawing pictures for you, Katniss,” he interrupts, his color still high, “and I would love to make you a picture-book – if that isn’t too childish, of course,” he adds with a wince. “We had a little handful of picture-books that earlier generations of Mellarks wrote and illustrated and we pored over them every night at bedtime, stroking the handwritten pages and tracing the colorful paintings, drinking in every last little detail. They’ll end up being Marko’s, for his kids,” he explains, his voice brimming with apology, “or I would have brought them out here to share with you.”

My heart cracks painfully, both at Peeta’s regret and his impulse to share such a precious heirloom with me. I resolve to show him the plant book at the earliest opportunity; to press it into his big hands and see if he can help me find the stories hidden in its pages. “You’re too sweet,” I murmur, reaching a hand to his temple where the two curls are peeping out, “but it’s okay, really. My family didn’t have any picture-books, so it’s not like I’m missing them now.”

“None at all?” he wonders with the same sort of dismayed disbelief as when I told him I’d never tasted lemon before, and when I shake my head his face falls as though I just told him someone died. “That’s _terrible_ , Katniss,” he says in a hushed, stricken voice. “I’ll make you a whole shelf full of books about vixens and redcapped songbirds and greedy goslings,” he resolves in an eager rush of breath. “And beautiful princesses with long black braids too.”

I shake my head, blushing for reasons I don’t quite understand. “But that would take a _lifetime_!” I protest.

“We _have_ a lifetime ahead of us,” he reminds me gently. “And I can’t imagine a better way to spend my share than making beautiful things for you and your children.”

Something hot and sharp splinters in my heart. “No children,” I tell him in a whisper because there won’t be, _ever_ , not with Peeta married to his Seam sweetheart and filling her womb with little black and gold nestlings at every turn. “Y-You’d be better off making presents for _your_ kids,” I suggest weakly and turn my face with a stifled whimper to avoid those heartbreaking, beloved eyes.

“Katniss,” he says softly, bringing a hand to my averted cheek, but he doesn’t turn my face to meet his gaze. “The gifts are yours,” he murmurs, “the whole lifetime’s worth, regardless of whether or not you ever have kids. And let me assure you –” He sits up beneath me, just enough to rest his cheek against mine, and whispers, “The only children that will ever fill this house will be your own.”

My breath catches and now I do I turn toward him, but he’s so close that I only manage to drive my cheek firmly against his. “That’s madness, Peeta,” I whisper back. “You were born to be a father, to –” But I can’t manage more than that because I want, more than anything else in all the world, the future that dances on the edges of his words. Black-haired goslits and honey-curled kitlings, a shelf full of picture-books illustrated by Peeta’s skillful hands and this gentle, perfect boy as my husband; cooking my meals, cutting my snow-paths, sharing my bed…

I resolve here and now to do everything in my power, however crude and clumsy, to make his life as rich and sweet as he does mine.

“Let me make you breakfast,” I offer in a rush; the first thing to come to mind. “I’m nowhere near as good a cook as you, obviously, but I can make squirrel guts tasty enough that Prim will gobble them up without hesitation – not that I’ll be making you squirrel guts, of course, but –”

He lays back in the snow, flushed and twinkling, and grins up at me. “I’ve missed a good squirrel in the pot,” he teases, “but a fried egg or two wouldn’t go amiss either.”

“I can make fried eggs,” I answer eagerly. “Soft, hard, somewhere in-between–?”

“Surprise me,” he replies, only to immediately hedge, “I mean, if you want to. I’m almost done here, really, and I was going to –”

“I _want_ to make you breakfast,” I tell him firmly. “I want to make you lunch and supper too, and all kinds of little snacks and treats and hot drinks. I want to take care of you so badly –”

“Why?” he wonders solemnly, but there’s a tiny impish smile tugging at the corners of his mouth and I know he knows the answer – the one I gave him last night. He just, for some strange reason, wants to hear it again, and I have no aversion to telling him.

“Because you’re the most precious thing in the world to me, Peeta Mellark,” I reply smartly and flick his nose with the tip of my tongue. “Now finish cutting my snow-path, lazy gander, so I can go a-hunting and bring you home a nice fat squirrel.”

I try to stand with aplomb but his arms – and the bearskin – are still wrapped around me and I manage to push up a scant inch or two before falling smack-down on top of him again. “I like this plan exceedingly,” he informs me; a warm, moist nuzzle against my ear that makes me shudder and ache deep in my belly. “I’m just not altogether ready to let go of you, little vixen. It’s not often that a gander gets the upper hand – er, _wing_ – in a situation like this and I’m afraid if I let you go you might try to gobble me up or, worse yet, run away and leave me all alone.”

There’s a startlingly plaintive note in these words and I lean against him, rubbing my cheek against his mouth in a kit-like, reassuring fashion. “I’m not a turkey, silly gander,” I remind him, “though I can’t promise there won’t be any gobbling _ever_ , and anyway, where would I go? _You_ are my home.”

I lean back just a whisper to meet his eyes and this time it’s a serious exchange. Silly as we may be in our banter of ganders and vixens, my dedication to this boy is absolute, and the resulting catch in his breath implies that he understands this, maybe for the first time ever. “I’ll do everything I can to be worthy of that,” he whispers. “To be worthy of _you_ ,” and I shush him with my forehead pressed to his.

“Everything about you is better than _any_ part of me could ever hope to be,” I murmur. “I’m just a strange wild creature of feather, fur, and bone; no more special than any bird or beast in these woods, but I care so much about you. Please let me make you breakfast.”

He gives a broken little chuckle and tips his head so our noses brush. “Every creature in these woods is precious, Katniss,” he replies, “every last bird and beast, and you are their very queen. I would be delighted – nay, humbled beyond measure – to eat a meal you prepared.”

It’s just pretty lies, of course, more sweet honeyed nonsense spilling effortlessly from Peeta’s golden tongue, but my heart sighs in response nonetheless. “Well then,” I murmur, brushing his nose in turn, “you should probably let me go.”

Peeta presses his lips together, narrows his eyes, and makes a sound in his throat that resembles nothing so much as a whine: the painful, wrenching sort made by a hungry, injured, or abandoned animal. “I don’t want to,” he whispers, and there’s nothing silly or teasing or playful about it. “I-I mean: I want _both_ things,” he clarifies with a thin smile, as though trying to cover up the vulnerability in his previous statement. “I want breakfast – breakfast made by you – and I need to finish cutting the snow-paths, but…I want so badly to keep holding you,” he concludes in a small, sheepish voice.

I swallow back half a dozen sounds of pleasure – a sigh, a moan, a whimper, a giddy little laugh – and chase a cheeky smile onto my face. “Well,” I suggest delicately, “I can easily make breakfast while you finish the snow-paths, then you can come in and we can eat together, maybe on the sofa, and if you wanted to you – maybe you – could hold me then.”

I don’t know how I get the words out without blushing or dissolving into a fit of euphoric giggles. This can’t be real; none of it. Peeta Mellark is holding me like a lover and wants to continue doing so, even at the cost of his breakfast, and I’m gleefully coming up with ways to make that happen.

“I was hoping you would say something like that,” he confesses, and now the sheepishness is in his smile. “But I really want my present too, which means I need to let you work this morning…”

My brows fly upward in mock-affront and I sit up sharply. Peeta’s hold around me loosens but doesn’t break and his arms slide down my back to encircle my hips, anchoring me snugly over his pelvis. “First of all,” I declare, as frightfully as I can manage, “how dare you assume that it’s your decision whether I snuggle with you or stretch a deerskin.”

Peeta’s eyes gape in genuine horror and I consider reassuring him with a flicker of a smile, but not quite yet. “Secondly,” I forge on, every bit as sternly, “I’m appalled that you persist in assuming that this deerskin of mine is meant for you in some way.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, mortified and contrite. “I-I thought maybe, since you wouldn’t let me help or even be out there –”

“And thirdly,” I thunder on, “I managed to sew and stuff a rabbit-skin muffler _and_ a pillow without your knowledge, without shirking any of my huntress duties or, as far as you were concerned, altering my schedule in any way. Do you really think –?” The smile breaks through then, spiraling irrepressibly from the corners of my mouth. “Do you really think,” I say, “that I can’t manage to work a deerskin and cook a meal and still find all the time in the world to be with you?”

Peeta sighs, a deep sinking moan of relief. “I’ll concede that,” he replies, mirthful but ragged, as though he can’t quite believe that I’m not really upset with him. “But we weren’t snuggling back then,” he points out, “and snuggling with a wild creature is a serious business, not to be taken lightly or for granted.”

“Is that so?” I wonder teasingly, cocking my head at him in inquisitive-bird-fashion.

“You never know when – or if – it will happen again,” he says, and it’s another naked confession, like his refusal to let me go. “All that sweet soft fur and bright eyes and nuzzling – _so_ much nuzzling,” he moans, closing his eyes for a moment. “And I know that’s the nature of lo– of befriending a wild thing: learning patience and earning trust; never pursuing, no matter how badly you want to, but always waiting for her to come to you, but…there’s a vixen on top of me,” he breathes, opening his eyes once more. “The very queen of these wild woods, who left her snug warm den to find me; to topple me in the snow and nuzzle me to bits. I don’t think I can bear it if that never happens again,” he confesses in a whisper. “I know it’s a terrible thing, holding onto an animal that’s trying to get away, but –”

I need him to stop talking. If he says another word my heart will literally fly out my mouth and hit him in the face, a damp and downy redbird with only one song to sing, and she’ll trill it over and over and over again, damning me and destroying this – this wonderful, breathless, magical _thing_ between me and Peeta that feels so good, so _impossibly_ good that it almost hurts – forever. So I do the only thing I can think of.

I kiss him squarely on the mouth, right when he least expects it.

I realize it’s a terrible idea as it’s happening – the worst idea I’ve ever had; maybe the worst idea anyone’s ever had in all the world – but it’s too late; far too late to stop. Before Peeta can begin to guess what I’m doing I plunge my head down like a heron seeking a fat perch and press my mouth firmly over his, driving his blue-crested head back into the snow.

It’s an awful kiss, even worse than my first attempt. Everything about it is wrong. Peeta’s rigid beneath me – horrified, I would imagine, if not terrified – not yielding and warm, and my mouth is hard and beastlike; a vixen’s gruff chiding kiss to her errant kit. His lips, still moving with words when mine crashed down, are tight and frozen, like the door of the shack after an ice storm, and I want to burst into tears.

Of course he doesn’t want my kiss. He doesn’t want me at all.

_Katniss, what have you done?_

I’ve kissed – am _still_ _kissing_ – Peeta Mellark, without reason or ribbon. I only did it to shut him up, to stop him saying more tender, beautiful things that would make me blurt out my love, but surely by kissing him I’ve done just that.

It’s over now, all of it. Rabbit skins and deerskins and falling asleep in each other’s arms amid furs and firelight. Oranges and ribbons and the promise of a whole crate of lemons. Goslits and kitlings and a shelf full of priceless hand-painted storybooks.

I sit up, gasping air back into my lungs to apologize one last time.

Peeta gazes up at me with wide eyes, the pupils so huge and dark that the bright blue barely makes a thumbnail moon around them, and he’s panting a little too; quick, shallow puffs of frost leave his lips as his chest jerks beneath me. He’s about to tell me to go, I know it; to take my father’s coat and my hunting boots and start trekking back to town, and if I can just find my tongue before he finds his I won’t have to hear him say it.

“What was that for?” he whispers, and just like that, I’m transported back to my bird dream. To a drab little brown-black bird rubbing her tiny head against the bare chest of a gentle blond boy, right over his heart.

Somehow, _impossibly_ , he’s not angry with me. Stunned and perplexed, yes – of course; naturally, how else could he feel in response to such a wildly unexpected act? – but not angry.

Maybe it doesn’t count as a real kiss if it comes from a wild creature.

In other circumstances this would be a heartbreaking thought but right now it’s the sweetest to ever cross my mind. Instinct kicks in swift and keen and I bring a hand to the neckline of my nightgown, twining the loops of its red ribbon-tie around my fingers. “I missed one,” I tell him with unfeigned shyness. “One more ribbon means one more kiss, right?”

Peeta’s face lights up like the dawn, or maybe it’s literally the dawn itself – the sun rising through the woods just beyond us and shimmering over the fresh snow, all pink and gold – spilling across his sweet face. “I thought maybe you didn’t notice,” he says with equal shyness, raising a hand to brush the ribbon at my throat. “Or…or maybe it didn’t count.”

“Didn’t notice?” I echo, not bothering to hide the aghast note in my voice. “What sort of huntress do you take me for, to overlook something so vibrant and precious?”

Sweetheart ribbons are bright as winter berries and even more precious to receive, but of course I don’t tell Peeta that. If I understand his reasoning correctly, I can have as many kisses as he’s given me red ribbons, whether I received them at New Year’s or not.

I like this game very much.

“And now I think of it,” I go on merrily – no, _greedily_ , and shamelessly so, like a cat spying an unattended bowl filled to its brim with fresh cream or maybe a vixen with an oblivious, tender young chicken in her sights – “you tied a ribbon around my New Year’s jar of applesauce.”

I dip my head with a grin, eager to dispense another kiss, but Peeta stops me with a hand at my shoulder. “Actually,” he croaks, “I-I was hoping I could save that kiss for a little while.”

Far from being dismayed, I laugh aloud. “You can’t save up New Year’s kisses, silly beak,” I tease, tapping his beloved mouth with a fingertip. “They’ll go bad before summer; everyone knows that.”

“I wasn’t thinking so long as that,” he replies. “I, um…it’s my birthday in a couple of months and –” He breaks off, blushing hot and fierce. “I-I thought…I might like to have a kiss then,” he concludes in a very small voice.

“ _Oh_ ,” I breathe, my mind filling with the image of Peeta sitting alone at his kitchen table with a pretty little birthday cake and no one to share it with him but his beloved garden birds.

Of course, his sweetheart won’t be giving him anything for his birthday, let alone a precious kiss, and I’d hazard a guess he didn’t get many birthday kisses as a child either.

_My poor sweet boy._

I have no idea when Peeta’s birthday is – March, perhaps? – but it would make the perfect occasion to give him the deerskin, along with dozens of other wild presents, of course.

“A birthday kiss is easy enough,” I assure him, endeavoring to hide my delight at the prospect. “I’m happy to save one till then. But what about the ribbon you tied around my mug handle last night?” I wonder with a playful, foxy grin. He’s not holding me back with any real force, and if he lets his arm slack I can nip down and steal another kiss with ease.

Peeta promptly looks out across the garden, evading my eyes. “I thought…I-I thought maybe I could have _two_ kisses for my birthday,” he confesses to the snow, sounding like nothing so much as a sad little boy, at once defeated and hopeful. “If that’s excessive or…or greedy, though,” he says quickly, looking up at me once more, “we can scrap that second kiss altogether or –”

“Two kisses sounds quite reasonable,” I break in, tracing his mouth with a gentle fingertip. He really has no idea, my precious, kiss-starved sweetheart. Come his birthday I’ll give him more kisses than he could ever dream of. I’ll smother him with kisses, gleeful and giddy, without a single breath of hesitation before any one of them.

“And what about all the little ribbon scraps?” I wonder quietly. “The ones tied around my braids, from your evergreen sprigs last night.”

He turns his head just enough to press a small kiss to my fingertip where it lingers against his mouth. “I thought they might be nice before I leave for the Games,” he says softly. “Or maybe after I get back.”

My heart breaks open at these words. My poor sweet boy, rationing his New Year’s kisses like his last loaf of bread; saving them for what will surely be the time of greatest need, of grief and sorrow and fear. The first Games since his own, when he has to go back to the Capitol and try to save the life of one of two doomed kids who might be former classmates, neighbors, even friends.

No matter what happens he’ll come home broken, little better than after his own Games.

I’ll kiss him so much before he leaves, regardless of ribbons, that he’ll barely notice the Reaping, the Capitol, or their terrible Games, and afterward I’ll bound to him at the train platform, catch him up in my arms in a cascade of soothing kisses, and carry him home to a nest of silky furs. I’ll bathe him in the stone tub, gently scrubbing the grime of Capitol corruption and cruelty from his precious body, then I’ll tuck him into my own bed and feed him hearty spoonfuls of rabbit stew and love him with all my might.

But of course, I tell him none of this.

“That’s an awfully long time for a kiss to keep,” I say instead, lightly. “You’d do just as well to enjoy them now and get a fresh batch when summer comes.”

Peeta gazes up at me with hungry, hopeful eyes. “See, I was thinking,” he says, a little raggedly, “if we could find a jar with a nice snug lid, maybe I could keep those kisses indefinitely – till I need them, you know? They’re just little kisses, after all – half-kisses, even – so if we kept them tucked away, safe and sound –”

I lean down slowly; intently, but slow enough that Peeta could stop me if he wanted to. His breath catches but his hand slacks and slips against my shoulder as I gently, so very, _very_ gently, kiss his mouth: a soft, careful, unhurried press of lips followed by a nuzzle, brushing my mouth across his again and again.

I wonder why I avoided his lips earlier when it feels so nice and good and _right_ to kiss him there. There’s an almost magnetic draw between my mouth and his; now that I’ve found it, it feels impossible to break away from. Like my mouth was crafted for his, to meet and interlock – no, meld together – in an exquisite new whole.

 _Stolen kisses,_ my conscience chides harshly in Peeta’s mother’s voice. _You aren’t the girl he loves. There’ll be a limit to these friendly kisses, mark my words, and your heart will break beyond repair when he finally has to tell you it can’t go on._

I pull back just enough to meet Peeta’s eyes, which are wide and stunned but not in an unpleasant way. He looks like he’s just witnessed something wondrous beyond compare, like a solar eclipse or a doe birthing triplets. “Don’t worry, sweet boy,” I soothe, brushing the tip of his nose with mine. “You’ll still get your birthday kisses and Reaping kisses and post-Games kisses – all the little half-kisses you could ever want. That one was for the ribbon on the spile.”

“Come here,” he groans, and he pulls me down into his arms, somehow even deeper than before, and hugs me so tightly to him that I’m half-certain he’s fused us together. “Can I keep you, Katniss?” he whispers against my cheek, rocking me against him. “Will you stay with me for as long as you live and be my very own vixen, my redcap, my precious little goose?”

“ _Yes,_ ” I promise, answering without teasing or hesitation in a wild flood of bliss. “I’ll stay with you forever.”

This, I imagine dazedly, is how the tale of the fox and the little prince should have gone. When the moment of departure arrived, the prince would catch up his tamed companion and carry her off with him on endless adventures – or better still, he’d choose to stay and build a life with her, amidst apple trees and wheat fields and stolen chickens, instead of returning to his lonely planet and his proud, foolish rose.

“Please keep me forever, little prince,” I plead, a muffled whimper against his throat, and Peeta eagerly moans his assent.

“I could never let you go, little fox,” he whispers, squeezing me so tightly that it crushes the breath from my lungs and makes stars dance behind my eyes. “My precious little fox.”

“I might nip you,” I warn him feebly, my heart soaring. “I’m fierce a-and positively greedy when it comes to food and….and I like chicken way too much –”

“I know all of that already and love every bit,” Peeta says huskily. “I love it when you’re fierce and love it even more when you nip me. I love how greedy you are for my cooking – how furious you get when I try to feed you someone else’s – and I’ll make you chicken for every meal for the rest of your days if it means you’ll stay with me forever.”

Something in his words makes me ache between my legs, a deep, hollow yearning that I try to ease by shifting my pelvis against his – the thing I wanted so badly to do last night, to be close and _complete_ as we held each other on the sofa – and we fit together like a sigh, just as I’d imagined. The slight, firm rise between his legs nestles perfectly into the empty, aching cleft between mine and it feels so overwhelmingly, breathtakingly _good_ that I rock and twist my hips in hopes of even _more_ , rubbing blissfully against him with soft, eager little mews.

Peeta gives a muffled cry; a sharp, pained sound, and I clamber backwards onto his thighs, horrified to have hurt him and, no doubt, mortified him all at once. I can’t begin to guess why rubbing against his groin felt so good, but I’m intelligent enough to know that his most private and sensitive parts are housed there and it must be uncomfortable, if not downright painful, to have my weight pressing down, squashing them.

“I’m so sorry!” I blurt, squeezing my eyes shut so I don’t have to look at him after this appalling mistake. “I didn’t mean to hurt you! It just felt so good to be close to you that I wanted…” _I wanted to be even_ closer _,_ I add silently, but I can’t begin to understand what that means. “I-I don’t know what I was thinking,” I whisper, “and I’m so incredibly sorry.”

To my utter astonishment, this is met with a breathy chuckle and a gentle brush of gloved fingers against my cheek. “Katniss,” Peeta says, and his voice is as uneven as his laughter. “You absolutely _didn’t_ hurt me, or do anything wrong whatsoever. It felt –” He breaks off and hesitates for a long moment, clearing his throat several times. “It felt _wonderful_ – _beyond_ wonderful – to have you so close to me,” he murmurs. “It…took me by surprise, how good it felt.”

I open my eyes to frown dubiously down at him. This is so obviously a kind lie – that it could be anything short of excruciating to have someone sitting heavily atop your groin – that it hurts to hear, but it’s sweet and selfless of him to say it nonetheless. “Don’t lie to spare my feelings,” I scowl.

Peeta shakes his crested head with a sad, crooked smile. “Oh Katniss,” he sighs, “I shudder to think where we would be right now if you allowed yourself to believe even half of the things you’re convinced can’t be true.”

I blink rapidly, tangled up in the riddle of his words. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

He grins suddenly, seizing both of my hands and bringing them to his mouth for a sprinkling of sound kisses. “It means,” he replies, “that at this moment, I want breakfast made by these two little hands more than anything else in the whole world.”

I cock my head in contemplative bird-fashion and narrow my eyes in thought. Peeta’s clearly a skillful liar and what he’s saying is true in part, but: “No, you don’t,” I determine. “You want to snuggle with me some more.”

At this Peeta bursts out laughing, so hard that it jostles me on my perch across his thighs and brings tears to his bright eyes. “Oh, little goose,” he says, gasping through his laughter and squeezing my hands. “Only you could say such a thing and make it sound like bad weather is on the way. You’re absolutely right,” he informs me merrily, “and I adore you.

“ _Please_ make me breakfast, little sweetheart,” he beseeches, swinging our joined hands like an imploring child. “I’ll finish your snow-path in two shakes and then I’ll come in and we can eat, or just curl up together if you want, or curl up together _for_ eating and –”

“Okay,” I squeak, because every one of these prospects – minus getting off Peeta and having to go inside without him – sounds like heaven. “What would you like for breakfast, lazy gander?” I ask breathlessly. “I mean, besides your fried eggs.”

He grins. “Fried eggs from you would be a feast for a king,” he says. “That’s enough, really – _more_ than enough – so long as I get a few dusky vixen toes to nibble afterward.”

I flush fiercely at this request and not just from silliness. “That sounds easy enough,” I reply, a half-lie. He’s going to get much more than fried eggs, of course, and I have no intention of presenting him with my bare toes to nibble, however playfully.

I scramble to my feet, eager to start on his meal, and flinch as the cold air strikes me like a blow. Without the warmth of Peeta’s coat and body I could well die out here in my nightgown.

“Hey, hold on,” Peeta says, clambering up out of our snow-hollow, and he rushes to enfold me in the bearskin. “You can’t go back to the house like that,” he says, hugging me to him with the fur. “You’ll freeze.”

“It’s less than fifty feet away,” I point out, but in a contented sort of haze. I hadn’t expected to be wrapped in boy-musk and bearskin again so soon and now I have even less desire to forsake it.

“Still,” he says, and we make our way back to the house in a lopsided three-legged-race fashion, hugging each other about the middle and stumbling over each other’s feet and laughing all the while. Peeta insists on walking me up the steps, even, but once the door is open he tries to gently eject me directly from the bearskin into the house without bringing himself inside, a plan I neatly derail by catching hold of his waistband and tugging him over the threshold along with me.

“You’ll freeze too,” I chide and re-bundle him snugly, closing the clasps on the bearskin, tugging up the muffler to cover him from cheeks to breastbone, adjusting his crested cap for maximum coverage, and even retrieving one of my father’s scarves for an extra layer of warmth around his head and neck.

He looks not unlike a child when I’m done; a round Merchant boy in a patchwork of mismatched outerwear, and I giggle at the sight. “I hope you’re pleased with yourself, little vixen,” he teases – or rather his eyes do; the only part of him that’s still clearly visible. “The next time you go hunting I get to bundle _you_ up.”

I envision standing beside the living room fire while Peeta swaddles me in so many furs that I can barely walk, let alone climb a tree or draw my bow, and imagine shedding those furs like a chrysalis to leap jubilantly on my boy in a scarlet swirl of newborn wings – or better still, parting the furs just enough to slip my boy inside; my bear-mate, to hibernate with me all winter through, all downy bare skin and sweet musk and moist, sleepy nuzzles about each other’s ears and throat.

“That sounds fair,” I reply, and with a kiss to the furry hillock of Peeta’s nose I turn him about and nudge him back out the door, with a dusting sweep down the back of his bearskin for good measure.

I watch him return dutifully to his snow-shovel and turn back to give me a little wave before he resumes his work, and I’m so overcome with happiness that I almost can’t breathe. I’m bursting with it; half-stupid with it. I love Peeta and he adores –

 _Yes,_ I realize, like a certain whisper over the stilled breath in my lungs. No, Peeta doesn’t _love_ me, not like a man loves a woman or even like a boy loves a girl, but this isn’t just indulgence, not anymore. This is the prince kneeling in the meadow and opening his arms for his little fox to spring into. His pink cheek rubbing her sleek one, his big hands cradling her small body snugly to his chest.

A little sound leaves my throat, half a laugh and half a sob, and I feel dampness at the corners of my eyes.

My boy _adores_ me.

Fox-Katniss and bird-Katniss – redcap-Katniss and greedy-gosling-Katniss – but _Katniss_ nonetheless.

The urge to take care of him, to bundle him up in my love and wrap him snug as a babe almost suffocates me. It’s a pleasant urge but an overwhelming one, the likes of which I’ve never felt before. If I’d managed to doubt it till now it would be undeniable in this moment.

I love him. Love him so much that there’s no room for anything else, neither sleep nor hunger nor thought for breath.

Confirming just how thoroughly I’ve lost my mind, I dissolve into a fit of giggles.


	9. Unexpected Hunger

I hadn’t realized, being on top of Peeta for all that time this morning, just how wonderful it would feel to have him on top of me. How much freedom it would give me to touch, or how alluring the back side of his body could be. There’s so much of it that I can’t think where to start: his broad shoulder blades, the long groove of his spine, his downy nape…? Do I steal a hand – or both hands – away to bury in his crown of buoyant curls?

_Or could I simply take hold of the hem and drag it up over his head, to be engulfed in musky warm bulk and bare skin?_

I jerk my hands out from beneath his shirt with a terrified squeak because it’s back: that awful feeling from when I first marched Peeta up to this lover’s nest. Everything I’ve done so far has been innocent, if a little strange, but trying to pull his shirt off would be a obvious demand for something that will never, _can_ never be mine, and the fact that I even thought to attempt such a thing in the midst of this exquisite interlude, however innocently, is so horrifying that I feel sick.

Peeta must feel it too, or something equally awful, because he scrambles off me so quickly that he almost falls off the sofa, his sleep-clumsied limbs tangling in bearskin and fox fur. He frantically rights the covers over me and clambers down to crouch beside the sofa with feverishly flushed cheeks and the most miserable expression I’ve ever seen on his sweet face.

This is it, of course. He has to send me away now, for groping under his shirt and making him lie so intimately over me. Why couldn’t I just hold him like I said and leave well enough alone?

“I’m so sorry,” he blurts, his breath short and ragged as though he’s just run the length of the Seam. “I shouldn’t have…have… _any_ of that.”


	10. Touch-Hunger

This time it’s Peeta who’s confused, tilting his head in puzzlement at my words, and I want so badly to kiss him that I just do it, leaning forward to take his curly head in both hands and planting my lips squarely against the crown. “Touching you – and being touched by you in turn – feels like  _home_ ,” I murmur against his scalp. “I could never hope to earn such a comfort, let alone dream of paying it back.”

He leans back just enough to meet my eyes, so slight a movement that it doesn’t even shift my hands from their gentle anchors on the sides of his head. “I thought we were past earning and paying back,” he says softly, but he doesn’t sound upset or troubled in the least. He sounds curious, tender…hopeful, even, but in a deep, almost  _hungry_  sort of way.

“I sincerely hope we are,” I whisper, because there’s no way I could ever even  _begin_  to rectify the debt between us.

“Then could you please hold me a little longer?” he whispers back. “Because it feels so good to be in your arms that it  _hurts_  to be like this, so close and so far apart all at once.”

“ _Does_  it?” I rasp, because it’s excruciating on my end. It hurts more than I would ever have dreamt the absence of something could. My body aches everywhere, as though I’m being pulled constantly and inexorably by a strange sort of gravity, only that force is pulling me toward Peeta, not the earth, and every moment that I hold myself back from him is like trying to stop yourself from crashing into the earth in a freefall from a tall tree. I feel empty and cold and almost incomplete, as if anytime I’m not physically in contact with him, I’m missing pieces; crucial pieces of my heart and lungs and even that profound, elusive thing my father called a soul, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever be whole again. Touch, however tender and affectionate, is fleeting, even shallow in its comfort. I feel like I need Peeta  _inside_  me – his warmth and musk and gold flooding that heavy, pulsing hollow at the root of my belly that aches worst of all – to ever truly quench that hunger; that desperation for wholeness, and the impossibility of that is heartbreaking, even terrifying.

“If-If you don’t want to –” he wavers, but there was never any shadow of hesitation in my body or my mind. I kick back the furs and tug him up beside me, immediately climbing into his lap and winding myself around him like a particularly affectionate snake; arms snug around his neck and legs knotted about his waist, and squeeze him so hard that he whimpers.

_Mine mine mine mine mine_


	11. A Curious Confidante

I glance at the stable, thinking of the faithful animal companions in every good fairy tale, hearing all and sharing none, and bound inside: straight for Rye’s stall, where his long white face is already looming out, curiosity piqued by my unusually noisy manner of arrival. “Oh, _Rye!_ ” I cry, tossing aside the empty bird tray to unlatch the stall door with trembling fingers, and slip inside to fling my arms around the pony’s broad shaggy neck and bury my face in his mane.

I don’t consider for a moment that I’m hugging a creature large enough to crush me with a simple shift of its weight or batter me to death with its heavy hooves, and sweet placid Rye gives me no reason to; just a deep, understanding sort of whuffle in reply.

“Oh, Rye,” I say again, a long sigh into a faceful of coarse pale hair, “I love Peeta. I love him so much; love him with all my might – and we just took a nap together; the two of us, snuggled together on the sofa like mousekins in a nest! I cooked breakfast for him and he loved it, every last bite – and I kissed him out in the snow! I knocked him over and nuzzled him to bits and _I kissed him_ _on the mouth!_ ” I squeal. “And he wasn’t angry or anything; he just asked what it was for, like in my bird dream, when I rubbed my little head against his heart.”

The pony whuffles again – somehow, all the response I require – and dips his head toward my hip pocket, lipping determinedly at the corduroy.

“All right, you greedy thing,” I giggle, nipping out of the stall and latching the door firmly behind me before producing two sugar cubes from the pocket he was sniffing. “I’ll trade you sugar cubes for secrets,” I tell him in my toughest trader voice, proffering the cubes just out of reach, and wave them about tantalizingly.  “One cube for each sympathetic whuffle,” I tease. “Take it or leave it.”

Rye snorts and tosses his head impatiently – as close to a nod as I’m going to get – and I give him the cubes, and a quick kiss on the nose for good measure. “Done,” I declare. “And may I say, lazy lump, you’ve snagged yourself quite a bargain.”


	12. A Dream of Beloveds and Babes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posted to Tumblr as a very small slice of sleepytime comfort for certain precious anons and anyone else who could use a little sweetness right now. <3

_I’m in a place at once familiar and impossible: the Seam house I grew up in, yet as I’ve never seen it before. There is a merry, sooty coal fire on the hearth, blazing cheerfully beneath a beribboned garland of pine, and all about are the comforting scents of snow-dampened wool and leather and furs, of rabbit stew, deer-blood sausage, and hot acorn bread spread with goat cheese and honey._

_It feels like home, but not my own._

_I’m sitting in Granny Ashpet’s rocking chair, wearing a long dress of soft red plaid cotton. My lap is draped with a familiar ashen-silver fur with glints of copper; my fox fur –_ my true skin, _I think idly – and I curl forward to hug the firm, proud swell of my belly with both arms._

_The babies are elated._

_I don’t know how I know this, but I do. They’re so full of joy that it almost hurts. They’re coming soon, so soon now, and I’m impatient to cradle and cuddle them, to guide a hungry little mouth to each breast and kiss their sweet tiny faces as they suckle._

_My grandmother is seated on a crate with my bare feet in her lap, massaging them with her strong tanned hands. She’s older than she ever lived to be: her hair, pinned in a slapdash sort of bun at her nape, is almost entirely silver, and her striking face is lined by decades of happiness and hours spent hunting beneath the sun, and yet she’s still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. “It’s not often we get a visit from the moon herself,” she remarks, as though we’ve been at this conversation for some time, not just beginning it. “And how are the fawnlings today?” she wonders, looking up with a dazzling smile._

_“Fawns?” says a man’s voice, brimming with laughter, and Grandpa Asa comes up beside her, a jaunty cap tugged low over his wild shock of gray hair and the beginnings of a stick dolly in one hand. “’Tis a peeping fat goose, acushla,” he corrects her with a wink, “silver as dandelion-down, and a merry golden kit. Goslit and kitling,” he informs us, gently laying his free hand on my belly. “None other could it be.”_

_He is neither handsome nor ugly, this man I have never quite been able to picture in my mind, with his hooked nose and soft gray eyes. He has a face that instantly feels like_ home, _like sooty fires and musty quilts and ancient lullabies, and I no longer wonder why Granny Ashpet chose a slight, plain dreamer of a boy over every other in the district._

_My grandfather is gentleness incarnate, and I see the adoration in Granny Ashpet’s face as she looks up at him – a feat not often achieved between the two of them, owing to my grandmother’s superior height. “Think you so, lover?” she wonders. “This doe wants fawns, make no mistake, and her golden boy is crowned with antlers.”_

_“That signifies little enough,” says Aunt Laurel in passing and I look up with a grin, half expecting her to be wearing her own antlers, but she looks so wonderfully ordinary and Seam-born with her muddy boots and flannel coat and silver-threaded braids that I want to clamber up from this chair and hug her about the waist. She’s about an inch taller than her aging father, making it painfully clear just how diminutive he truly is, and takes full advantage of this by pressing a sound smack of a kiss atop his capped head._

_“Have you never seen her mate, Papa?” she wonders. “The sun himself, he is. She carries the stars in her womb, Morning and Evening both. Jackie!” she calls. “Tell them. You know better than anyone.”_

_My father emerges from the next room, wreathed in smiles and handsomer than ever, his faintly silvered black hair tied back at the temples. “You silly lot!” he laughs fondly. “You’re all more hair than wit. Catkin has loved the white bear since long before she understood it. She wept like a bereaved lover not to have him in her arms when she was just five years old, make no mistake about it. I told her he would come to her in time; all she need do was wait, and so he did._

_“Catkins and cubs,” he declares, coming over to press a kiss to the kerchief tied about my braids like a little red cap. “White bear-cubs and downy silver catkins,” he says, with a caress of my cheek. “My daughter would have nothing less.”_

_“Beloved!” cries a muffled voice that makes my heart leap and the babes in my belly surge about wildly. “What madness is your kin conspiring with all this talk of animals?”_

_My husband has come._

_Warm golden light seeps around the edges of the front door, brighter and more beautiful than any lantern or torch. The light of the sun itself, powerful enough to hatch black and gold nestlings from pebbles._

_“Open the door to me, Katniss,” he implores, “for I am heavy-burdened with gifts and mean to kiss you at once, and thoroughly, upon my entering.”_

_I laugh delightedly and shake off my kin, wriggling out of the chair with a great heave for my heavy belly. I’m half-delirious with eagerness and the babies are twice so, tremoring inside me with anticipation for their father. The promised kiss, of course, is only the beginning. My beloved intends to carry me to the nearest bed of musty quilts and there love me from head to foot, lavishing an immeasurable span of time on my belly, where our children lie, and lower down; the secret place, where he entered to plant them inside me. His touches there are the sweetest of all, and I blush deeply at the thought of engaging in such delicious intimacies while my family waits in the room adjacent, but a little embarrassment is not enough to give me pause, not when I am so near to joining with my beloved once more._

_“Whatever form he appears in is the form the babes will take!” Granny Ashpet whispers urgently, somewhere behind me._

_“I’ll take that bet,” her daughter whispers back._

_“Don’t bother with your trappings,” Granny Ashpet calls to my unseen beloved. “Your bride is anxious to see your face.”_

_“As am I for hers,” he calls in reply, then beseeches me with blatant adoration: “Moon-willow, vixen, sweet songbird who made her nest in my heart: please let me in! I am dying for want of your lips on mine and your precious body in my arms.”_

_I take hold of the latch, the metal gently warmed by his presence on the other side, and lift it with eager, trembling fingers. Whatever waits for me beyond this door – a magnificent golden buck, a great white bear, a silly yellow gander, or a young man incandescent with the sun’s own light – I love him all, and all of him, and I ache to see our babes and hold them in my arms._

_But not before I hold him, and love him with all my might._

_I fling the door wide open to a glorious blaze of hot, honey-golden light –_

– and I wake with an audible pang, my belly heavy and hollow and my heart a cold knot of grief.

No mysterious, unseen beloved. No babes. My father and his family are all dead, not surrounding me in gentle affection and making playful guesses as to the nature of my unborn twins.

And yet I’m not alone.

I’m lying beside – half on top of – a soundly sleeping Peeta, his powerful body cocooned around mine, snugging me solidly between his glorious warm bulk and the cushioned back of the sofa.

I smile.

“ _Welcome, beloved,_ ” I whisper soundlessly, tracing his heart with a fingertip, and shiver at the daring words cascading from my tongue, still caught up in the bittersweet, beautiful dream. “ _My door is always open to you, and my arms._ ”

He gives a soft grunt in response, making me start, and one strong hand slides over my body to cover my hand on his chest. “Sweetheart,” he drowses. “M’ little sweetheart…”

“Not quite,” I tell him sadly, almost silently. “You’ve caught a little black bird – tamed her, in fact – but she’s not the right one.”

“ _Only_ one,” he slurs insistently.

“I know, sweet boy,” I assure him with a gentle kiss to his forehead. “There’s only one bird for you, and always has been. We’ll get her for you, even if I have to lay the snare myself.”

“She lays the snares,” he sighs. “Lays snares for me…shimmering nets of moonlight…in her eyes.”

“And you want the moon,” I reply, intending to comfort him with the reminder, but I can barely choke out the words.

“I watch her,” he whispers. “Look for her every day in the sky, but she never comes near the sun. She’s barely close enough to feel his light…never close enough to hold.”

“She will be,” I promise, even as it breaks my heart to identify his sweetheart – some other birdlike Seam girl – as the huntress-moon. “Perhaps she’ll surprise you and catch hold of you herself,” I suggest. “She _is_ a huntress, after all.”

“ _My_ huntress,” he grunts, squeezing my hand, and I let a smile sneak onto my lips. However wildly he dreams of his sweetheart, he still knows who I am, even in slumber.

“Yours, whole and entire,” I agree, dipping my head to kiss his hand where it covers mine on his chest. “Always and entirely yours.”

He gives a pleasured little “ _Mmm…_ ” in reply and sinks into slow deep breaths once more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a personal headcanon (for my headcanon :P) that Jack Everdeen’s parents called him “Jackie” and thus if his little sister had survived, she would have done so too. 
> 
> Also, this is totally not original fiction in any way. Katniss totally had grandparents so it’s not like I’m, erm, making ~~all~~ any of this up…


	13. The Two Sides of Taming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is barely enough to merit a post but I haven't worked on WtM in so long that even a few new paragraphs seem worth sharing. :/

_Taming goes both ways,_ my father says in Peeta’s voice, and with a mourning dove nestled against my heart, I finally understand what this means. There must be trust and a certain measure of surrender on both sides, especially when you endeavor to tame something bigger, stronger, or more dangerous than yourself. This dove tamed _me_ , not the other way around; she came back to me again and again with food, knowing full well that I could hurt or even kill her, until I finally reached out for her touch.

There’s a sort of legend – my father’s own account, but surely more fairy tale than truth – that the cougar Granny Ashpet killed to save Grandpa Asa was like a sister to her. Two huntresses sharing territory and a certain measure of respect – sometimes even a portion of their kills, Dad claimed, but even he was never quite sure who had tamed whom.

That tale weaves itself through the present moment and brings to mind Peeta, the powerful yet impossibly gentle boy who chose to tame the wildest, perhaps deadliest creature in these woods without promise or hope of reward, and I marvel at the trust and surrender he’s demonstrated toward me. From our first moments alone in the sleigh I snapped and snarled at him as fiercely as any cougar and yet, like this dove, he’s persistently put himself at my mercy, holding out his hand or opening his arms to me. Twice this morning he lay without resistance or protest of any kind as I climbed over him, nuzzling his throat and kissing him to bits like the merriest, most besotted of kits, and these moments turn the concept of taming on its head. In a true taming the wild thing is always in control, of course, but I had never before realized how the tamer must also trust – must, in their patience, surrender to the tamed one, and ultimately be tamed in their turn.

I rub my cheek against my dove’s velvet shoulder and give a quiet coo of my own. “ _Catching and taming are very different things,_ ” I quote softly. “A bird learns patience where a girl learns trust, but in the end both are tamed.”

I try to pace myself, to not be too greedy with my finger-strokes and kisses and nuzzles, and it’s only minutely easier to exercise restraint with my dove than with Peeta. I wonder if my father would be disappointed in this behavior and decide almost at once that he would be amused, perhaps even pleased with me. After all, I’m the tamed one in this scenario, not the tamer, and therefore not subject to the same rules of _patience and optimism and hope beyond hope_ ; of _careful movements and soft words_. I handle her so gently – more gently than I would ever have dreamt I was capable of – and murmur all manner of tender nonsense against soft powdery feathers, but my brave dove demonstrates nothing short of bliss in the nest of my cupped hands, and I wonder how long and patiently she’s waited for this moment.

I wonder how long and patiently Peeta has waited to be pounced upon and nipped and nuzzled and veil my burning cheek against sweet dusky feathers that perfectly mirror my own skin. I can’t imagine why he’d want any of that from me, especially when his heart belongs so thoroughly to beautiful Columbine Wilhearn, but I also have no interest in questioning it. I’m his companion – his songbird, his vixen, his greedy little gosling – and while I can’t begin to comprehend it, he’s responded to this morning’s exuberant displays of affection with a bliss to rival that of the dove presently nestled against my heart.

“I love you,” I tell her again, as natural and fearless as breathing, and wonder if I might say the same to Peeta with equal ease. I’m more animal than human to him, really – in a beautiful fashion, not a condescending one – and the love of a wild thing is twice as precious as its trust. It would be little more than another effusive response from a small gray fox who’s dizzily happy to be tamed by her prince – nothing like a Seam girl telling a Merchant boy that she loves him. That she wants to wear his ribbons and share a dance at the Harvest Festival and toast bread together over his parents’ hearth, to lie in his bed and kiss his mouth and take his golden light inside her.

I think of the pressure in my heart every time I’m in his presence: pleasant but painful, swollen up with love as it is, and wonder if saying the words to him just once would ease it, even a little.

“Perhaps,” I whisper to my dove, and my heart quavers a little at my daring. “Perhaps I might.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Katniss has a new friend. And she's discovered the identity of Peeta's sweetheart - she thinks. ;)


	14. Acushla

All at once I feel terrible for holding her so long, however content she seemed to be, and guide her up onto my right hand, to hold her out at arm’s length. “You’re free,” I choke out, because with a wild thing there is no guarantee that a display of affection, even if initiated by the animal, will ever be repeated, and the last several minutes were effectively my own doing. This dove may well have satisfied her curiosity about human touch and never come near me again, except for a portion of kitchen scraps, and even then she might never again draw nearer than any of her greedy fellows. “I didn’t mean to…to _confine_ you,” I whisper, “and if you’d like to go –”

She takes wing at the bidding, as I half expected – but not to fly away. Instead, she flutters with a merry wing-whistle to perch atop my head, as particularly friendly or curious birds did to my father, every now and again, on our foraging walks in the woods, and just like him, I respond in joyous laughter, albeit with a mist of happy tears at the corners of my eyes. “Fair enough,” I chuckle. “I’ll even plait a braid-nest up there if you like, but today I need to look out for my sweetheart ribbons.” I reach up to coax her onto my hand again and bring her down to my left shoulder. “My sweater is hardier than those ribbons,” I tell her delicately, with a finger-caress the length of one tucked wing, and wonder if Lavinia will raise a brow at the presence of dove droppings on my clothing.

To my surprise the dove inches a little closer to my neck, ducking under my dancing pigtail as I return to my hide-stretching and fluffing up her feathers, so near they brush the tender skin like a shy and fleeting kiss. “If you’re planning to stick around,” I tease, turning a little to stroke her with my cheek, “I suppose we ought to name you.”

And for the second time this morning I play a name-guessing game, but this time it’s a happy one. I’ve never had an animal of my own to name, and the task presents a unique sort of challenge. The first to come to mind is “Laurel,” curiously enough, but it feels odd to name my dove for a person, especially one who seems so alive in my subconscious, so I try to think of things related to my new life here – white bears and snow maidens and the huntress-moon’s longing love for the sun – but nothing feels quite right. “Moon-dove,” I try on my tongue, like an endearment, then, with a little laugh: “Cream-Coffee?”

I think of honey, cream, and cloves; of bread pudding and sticky buns and ginger cake slathered in custard. The comfort of earth and spice, of taming and nuzzles and _Peeta_. “Nutmeg!” I exclaim, making her start a little in surprise, and this one’s better than the rest but still not quite right.

I frown and caress her idly with my knuckles. I don’t like creative problems, with several possible answers – not simply a single correct one – to evaluate individually and choose between. A name for a wild thing is little better than a nickname, really, so I’d do just as well to call her something silly like “Chirrup,” “Flutter,” or “Coo.”

But this dove is special beyond measure and deserves to be addressed accordingly. “Oh, little sweetheart,” I sigh in defeat – and just like that, I have my answer.

“ _Acushla_ ,” I breathe.

Most people who still use that ancient fairy-tongue endearment toss it about like a casual _sweetheart_ or _darling_ , but my father always spoke it with a certain reverence, and when I asked him what it meant, he did a strange thing – the same thing, he said, that Grandpa Asa did when Granny Ashpet asked him the same question – albeit with far more exasperation than I had. He sat me down beside him – we were in the woods that day and took a fallen tree for our bench – and brought my cheek to his chest, so my ear rested over his heart.

 _Do you hear it, catkin?_ he asked, and I nodded eagerly against him. I knew the sound of my father’s heartbeat better than any bird call or peeper’s song: so strong and steady and safe, it was, and I loved it more than every other sound in all the world, save for his beautiful voice. When we napped together on Sunday afternoons I often wriggled up to pillow my head on his chest for that very reason: to fall asleep to the beloved pulse of my father’s heart.

 _That is acushla,_ he said softly. _The pulse of my heart._

 _‘Acushla’ is something of a shorthand,_ he went on. _‘Acushla machree,’_ _it should be – but so much has been lost to time, and the meaning effectively remains the same. For on its own acushla simply means ‘pulse,’ and a pulse requires a heart, and in whose heart but your own would you wish your beloved’s name to pulse?_

I pressed my ear against his heart again, insistently this time, and strained with all my might, as though I might be able to make out the syllables of my mother’s name if I listened hard enough, and my father, chuckling in perfect understanding, lifted me up to sit in his lap. _My mama claimed she heard her name in the pulse of my papa’s heart that day,_ he said, _and that frightened the living daylights out of her. She so badly didn’t want to care for that scrawny, helpless toymaker, but when she heard her name echoed by his heart – his weak miner’s heart, pulsing her name like a beacon of pure, radiant love:_ Ash-pet, Ash-pet, Ash-pet _– she tore off into the woods like a pack of wild dogs was in pursuit._

 _The hounds of love,_ he chuckled, and I lifted my head with a start. _Do we need to watch out for them?_ I wondered foolishly, for even the smallest threat in the woods was not to be ignored.

He regarded me solemnly for a long moment, tracing my cheek with a fingertip. _Yes, catkin,_ he said at last, _I think your fierce little fox-heart will run from love, but not so stubbornly, nor so long, as your granny’s._

 _Don’t be afraid,_ he soothed to my wide eyes. _The flight is a frightful thing, perhaps, but the capture is not. It is nothing more nor less than being caught up in the arms of the one you already love with all your might; dropping your every last defense and allowing their heart to touch your own._

 _Was that the day Grandpa Asa found her in the shack?_ I asked. _The day she listened to his heart and ran from what it said?_

My father laughed at this, but so gently. _No, that was still many months in coming,_ he replied, _but as a direct result of that flight, if you will – for_ _that was the day she found the first white doe. She half stumbled upon it,_ he explained, _so blinded was she in her flight, and was almost afraid to shoot it, for she had never seen its like in the woods and white deer are rumored to be magical creatures, imbued with strange and wondrous powers. In the end she thought of the three small sisters of the scrawny boy who loved her and resolved to use the profits of this fine animal for their benefit – or so she told herself. She could sell the meat and blood and bone, even the organs, for a fine price and hide away those funds till such a time as she could convey them – slowly, of course, and in secret – to the girls or to their mother._

 _And the deerskin?_ I prompted, for I knew only how it ended up, not how it got there.

 _The skin she tanned with breathless care, even reverence,_ he said _, and smoked delicately, keeping it as pale as she could to reflect the beauty of the living doe. She was certain she would never find a fitting use for such a treasure, not even when she found the second white doe and had two perfect ivory skins to wrap and store and puzzle over. One day her hands simply reached for those carefully parceled skins and began to shape them into a beautiful garment, such as might be worn by a woodland queen on her wedding day – without informing her head, she told me, and bypassing her stubborn heart altogether. Even when she slipped it on for fittings, the obvious reason for its creation eluded her, even as she sang of love and fitted my papa’s ten-penny clasps into her hair._

 _T’was a pity she could not lay her cheek upon her breast and listen to her own heart,_ he concluded with a soft smile, _for that might have saved a bit of time – though like as not, my mama would have been even more terrified to hear the toymaker’s name echoed by her heart than she was to hear her own name upon his. Though she never said as much, I suspect she heard it in her slumber,_ he confided, _curled on her side like a small burrowing creature with an arm beneath her head. The wrist-pulse is weaker and yet distinct,_ he said, _and her stubborn heart was bursting with love by the time she finally surrendered to its longing. It would have sought any and every opportunity to make itself heard._

I brought my wrist to my ear and pressed as hard as I could, closing my eyes and straining to hear the secret that echoed in the pulse of my own heart, but my father drew it away with another gentle laugh and a sound kiss to my forehead. _Oh, catkin,_ he assured me, _when your heart finds its mate, you will not need to listen at pulses to know his name._

Smiling at the memory, I tip my head and lift my shoulder a little, to rub my cheek against my dove. “ _Acushla machree,_ ” I murmur, thinking again of the secret loves stored within doves’ hearts, and wonder if this gentle, intuitive moon-bird is up to the monumental weight of my own impossible love.

Under the right circumstances, I think my heart might well chirrup and coo…and even take wing with a chittering whistle.

I press a kiss to her tiny head and feel my heart ease a little with our shared burden. This brave, patient dove could not have come to me at a better time. “Oh, Acushla,” I sigh. “ _Thank you,_ so very much.”

Content with her naming and the tasks that occupy my hands and focus, Acushla alternates between a perch on my shoulder and a nest at the base of my neck, depending on how vigorously I’m working at any given moment. I tell her the origin of her name and a little about Granny Ashpet, the stubborn, beautiful huntress with her mysterious elf-king father and secret burrow of courting gifts from a poor, plain toymaker, and I’m just about to sing her a little of the ancient lover’s song when a discreet knock sounds at the back door of the workshop.

I don’t need to listen for the sound of rapidly retreating boots in snow.

I grin at Acushla, my heart fiercely aglow. “That’s lunch, I reckon,” I inform her merrily. “Shall we see what the sweet sun-boy has left for us?”

Lunch awaits in a basket today, with a jaunty red ribbon tied about its handle and a note tucked beneath the lip of its lid:

_Greedy gosling,_

_I hope I packed enough for both you and your new friend. I wanted so badly to come in and say hello, but she’s a shy one and I didn’t want to interrupt your time together._

_I’m sorry to leave you to another solo meal, but I’m dizzy from this morning’s vixen-cuddling and wanted to work through lunch on your present. Hope okay. Will endeavor to compensate with supper._

_Your affectionate Gander_

_P.S. I’ve enclosed an initial sketch for our storybook. I hope I made the babies right._

All thoughts of food forgotten – to say nothing of the realization that, somehow or other, Peeta has seen me with Acushla already – I set aside the note with a kiss to its sweet words and toss back the lid of the basket. Placed atop our meal is an exquisite pencil drawing, splashed here and there with gentle color, that makes my breath catch in a whimper.

In a nest of earth and evergreen boughs lies a fox kit furred with damp tufts of pale golden down; its eyes closed tightly and its body still curled from the confines of its moon-patterned egg, the luminous fragments of which lie scattered about its small, spent form. Beside the kit lies a newborn gosling, its sleek black fur still sticky from the womb, but its eyes are open, bright and eager, and its small dark bill is raised and parted slightly in a plaintive _peep_.

No, not a kit and a gosling: a goslit and a kitling, the offspring of a honey-feathered gander and a small black fox.

I hug the sketch to my heart with a quiet cry, overcome by the need to cradle these precious, impossible twins, to nurse my downy kitling, so weary from the efforts of hatching, and cuddle my silken goslit as I guide tender water grasses and tiny katniss blooms to its peeping mouth. “Oh, Acushla,” I whisper. “How does he know? How can he see them so clearly?”

 _How,_ cries my heart, painfully aware of the reality of Columbine Wilhearn, _can he see these babes –_ draw _these babes – in such detail, down to the moon-pattern of the kitling’s egg, and not realize they’re his children, birthed by you?_

“It’s just as well,” I tell my heart, by way of Acushla. “I told him it was a folktale – the gander and the vixen – and he’s depicting it as such, embellishing with pretty details from other stories and our life here in the woods. It’s impossible for these babies to exist anyway,” I remind us both, “so why should he even bother to imagine who their parents might be?”

She answers this with a distinctly askance look in her black-bead eyes, but before I can counter with some manner of cross or clever retort we hear the wide wooden doors of the stable creak open and Acushla, startled by the noise, flies out the still-open back door with a chittering whistle of dusky wings.

To my surprise, I’m not dismayed in the least by her departure. I still have a basketful of food for her to partake in, after all, and as much as I think she enjoyed having the last word in our conversation, I suspect she’ll be back for more.

That, and perhaps she cares for me a little.

Grinning like a fool at the thought, I tuck Peeta’s precious picture back inside the basket and carry it in to the workbench but leave the back door open, just in case Acushla should return, before heading up to investigate the new arrival.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I shared this teaser on Facebook a few days ago and a few highly talented friends were inspired to create adorable fan art of the goslit and kitling!
> 
> **From shellibug:  
>  (additional versions of this image at shellibug.tumblr.com/post/148994905875)**   
> 
> 
> **From kleeklutch:**   
> 
> 
> **From lost-in-the-fairy-realm:**   
> 


	15. Lovebirds in a Cuddle-Nest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> August 18 marks the 4th anniversary of When the Moon - or rather, of the day I uploaded the first two chapters to FFnet and all the madness began, so in honor of the occasion, I thought I'd share a longer excerpt from the (still in-progress) chapter. As requested, it's quite Everlark-centric and moderately spoilery. ;)
> 
> **Small tidbits of this scene have appeared in previous check-ins.**

The words drift away in the firelit dawn and it’s undeniable. The patch of flannel just above my right breast – the place where Peeta’s cheek is pressed – is sodden and cold and his breath comes quick and shallow.

My boy is _crying._

“Oh, sweet boy,” I whisper, longing to cry myself for having hurt him with the gift he wanted so badly. “I didn’t mean to make you sad. I-I thought you might like the song –”

“Little Katniss,” he breaks in hoarsely, almost kissing the words into my breastbone. “ _Oh_ , little Katniss: I _loved_ your song,” he whispers, “every word of it. I’m crying at how _beautiful_ it was. At…at how beautiful _you_ are,” he breathes. “Such a fierce and lovely vixen, all silk and teeth and clever, deadly paws, and yet you cradle and nuzzle me as tenderly as your very own kit and sing lullabies to me in a voice lovelier than any bird’s. You are more than I ever _dreamed_ , Katniss,” he whispers. “More than I ever could have imagined.”

“I’m not,” I protest weakly, but his words are so sweet and seemingly genuine, almost _naked_ in the emotion beneath. Peeta says overly nice and generous things – kind lies – to me all the time, but this one is impossible to reject, and it frightens me a little for that reason. Or rather, not frighten exactly…it stills and steals my breath and makes me tremble in a place deeper than skin and bone. I feel _found_ , caught, sighted in my hiding place by the most inexperienced hunter, and the wild thing within me is flailing and crying out for escape but I don’t know what to do. I want to bolt but there’s no threat here, only warmth and kindness, even affection, from the boy I love with all my heart, and so I slowly, carefully, deliberately force my body to relax onto the cushions.

“ _Oh…_ ” Peeta breathes, a soft, wondrous sigh, and I realize that he felt the change in me, however subtle and suppressed. The boy who knows I’m going to flee almost before I do knows I fought the urge this time, or maybe that it faded of its own accord, and the pleasure in his ragged voice threatens to shatter my heart.

I feel fresh tears, still warm through the damp flannel over my breast. “Please don’t cry,” I beg him, because if he persists there’s only one thing I can think of to staunch these tears and it involves something I’ve essentially promised to refrain from till his birthday. The forbidden magic of kisses, heady and powerful and not to be administered lightly.

“Oh Katniss,” he moans, rubbing his cheek against me, “there’s something I want so badly…s-so badly that it _hurts_. Sometimes it feels like I could just reach out and cup it in my hand like a tame sparrow, and sometimes it seems as impossible as catching the wind itself.”

I know what he wants, of course, or most of it. Between his beautiful words and stark longing, it practically paints a picture: a picture of a black-braided girl in a red plaid dress, singing like a bird as she cradles their chick-child, or lying naked beside Peeta in that bed of sunset, matching his tender kisses and gestures with her own.

“Shh, sweet boy,” I soothe. “Even the wind can be caught – or harnessed, at least.”

They “farm” the wind in another district – Three, I think, or could it be Ten with their endless plains? – catching it in enormous turbines and channeling its power to a station below.

“I don’t want to harness her,” he answers hoarsely. “I want her to be free, wild and happy and safe, but I –” His voice breaks. “I _want_ her too,” he whispers. “I want –”

“Shh,” I say again, tucking him against me to silence his words, in part because I can’t bear to hear them but also because I have a small idea that might bring him comfort. “I know what you want,” I tell him gently. “Once upon a time there was a little boy: a baker’s son who loved cheese buns and shortbread and birds –”

“I know all about that boy,” he breaks in sadly, as though dismissing this suggestion.

“Then you only know half of it,” I say, “because there is a girl in this story as well.”

“I know about the girl too,” he replies, miserably now. “I know everything about her, except what lies on her heart.”

I caress what lies on my heart, downy and pale as a newly hatched chick, and feel my lips curve in a smile, safely hidden from Peeta’s gaze. “Then listen,” I urge him. “Perhaps I can guess.

“Once upon a time there was a girl,” I go on, “a small, scrawny sparrow-child with long black braids who lived on the poorest fringe of a village. She knew of the boy; a golden apple-dumpling he was, shy and sweet and smelling always of soap and fresh bread and honey, and she smiled to look on him without quite knowing why.”

“Did she love him too?” Peeta whispers, and a breathless silence falls as I consider this.

Did I love Peeta when I was a child?

I’m supposed to be talking about his girl, of course, not about me, but I don’t know her story. I don’t even know her name.

But there’s no doubt in my mind as to what will happen once she learns of Peeta’s love, so I opt to recount what he’s told me or all of Panem, through his interviews, and fill in the blanks with myself, minus any details that might give it away.

“I don’t know that even _she_ could have said for sure,” I admit at last. “In the Seam love is a matter for family: for spouses and children, not skinny miner’s daughters and red-cheeked baker’s sons. It would never have occurred to this small girl that the sweet boy, round and golden as one of his beloved cheese buns, might belong to her, whole and entire, the way her strong, handsome father belonged to her mother.”

“Couldn’t she see it?” Peeta wonders quietly. “The love that poured from him as he gazed on her, day after day?”

There’s no doubt in my mind on this one. “I’m afraid not,” I tell him. “Perhaps the boy hid it too well, or perhaps the girl couldn’t see what she didn’t expect – and indeed, wouldn’t believe even if she _could_ see it. For example,” I add, warming to my topic, “this girl had absolutely no idea that she was beautiful.”

 _Is she really,_ I wonder, _or could Peeta love a plain girl?_

Of course he _could,_ but he won't have. That’s simply not the way these things work. His beloved will be something out of a fairy tale, all silky braids and flashing eyes.

If only I knew who she was.

“This girl had no idea that she was beautiful,” I say again, “radiant as the sun and luminous as the moon in turns, for she was shy and somber and preoccupied with her own lot. She did not feel the admiring glances of her male classmates and certainly not the adoring ones of her boy.

“Indeed, she did not think about her boy much at all,” I admit – no, _invent,_ because this isn’t supposed to be _my_ story – with a pang around my heart for Peeta’s sake. “Her life was a hard one, much like those of the other poor folk living on the fringe of their village, with little room in it for sentiment. But she noticed him,” I assure Peeta, “in the way that she noticed the pale, heady blossoms on his family’s old apple tree and the soft silver catkins spangling the meadow-willow. He was a fixture of her world; on the periphery of it, steady and golden and kind, like the sun itself.

“She noticed the day his mother hit him,” I murmur, _so_ carefully, because he can’t know that his beloved was there to witness it. “Surely he had done nothing wrong – nothing that could merit such a blow – but a cruel dark rose bloomed on his cheek nonetheless and swelled up beneath one sweet blue eye. She might have kissed that wound, the girl thought later, and brought him a little comfort, this boy who should mean nothing to her and to whom she must mean less than nothing.”

“But she _did_ kiss him,” Peeta whispers. “The day he was called away on his terrible journey, his girl came to see him and kissed his cheek, right where that blow had fallen five years before.”

My breath stills in grief at these words. I should have thought of that bruise – the very evidence of Peeta’s efforts to help me – at the Justice Building when I kissed him on the cheek, so impulsively, as a final desperate gesture of thanks for the act that earned him that awful blow. His sweetheart had done as much, despite not having been present for his injury, let alone the cause of it, and had given him some long-needed comfort along with her tender kiss.

I wonder how there could have been two of us in the Justice Building that day: two horribly out-of-place Seam girls dressed in their mother’s shabby best, kissing Peeta Mellark goodbye.

“When the boy was called away – oh, how to say what was in that girl’s heart,” I pretend to recount, pushing through the regret to continue the story for my boy. “She was nothing to him, so far as she knew, yet he had somehow become precious to her in ways she couldn’t begin to comprehend.

“She cried when they took him away,” I whisper. “She went somewhere no one could find her and her heart just broke apart with grief.”

A long, ragged sigh skitters across my chest. “She did?” Peeta breathes, almost in wonder.

“She cried more than she had ever cried in her life,” I confess. “She cried when they took him away and she cried at every terrible thing that befell him on his journey. She pressed a blanket to her mouth to muffle her scream when the wol…w-when the creature savaged him,” I rasp. “It haunts her to this day, to have witnessed her sweetheart’s pain and been powerless to stop it.”

His breath catches sharply and I feel it deep in my breast. “What did you say?” he whispers.

“That it haunts her to this day,” I say again, puzzled why such a sweet confession – _invention, Katniss!_ – should be so shocking. “That she could do nothing to stop that horrible attack or even help to tend him after.”

He lifts his head a little, just enough to meet my eyes, and his own are red-rimmed but very wide. “You said…” he whispers. “You called him ‘her sweetheart.’ ”

I force my features to stay calm, though I can’t prevent a gulp of terror as I mentally flail about for an explanation beneath the direct gaze of those beloved eyes. How could I have let the words slip out? How could I not have caught myself?

 _Because I didn’t_ need _to catch myself,_ I recall all at once. _Because I’m not telling him about_ me, _I’m telling him about his girl._ If I fell in love with him without realizing it, surely anyone could.

And then I remember the scrap of red cotton still, always, tied at his wrist: the red plaid of his beloved’s childhood dress and his own dreams of their joyful marriage. “She didn’t realize it then,” I tell him, “nor indeed, for a long time after, but sweetheart he had become, whole and entire. Perhaps her heart knew it before her head and led her to give him the bit of red cloth, for surely she would never have been so bold as to openly present him with a sweetheart’s token, let alone at such a time.”

Peeta tips his head a little from side to side, processing this. “That makes sense,” he says at last, but he continues to gaze at me for a long time, his eyes soft and wistful, before letting his head sink back to my chest. This time, however, he scoots up to burrow his damp face into the curve of my neck, like a drowsy but determined new pup. “Tell me more about this girl,” he instructs, sounding strangely content and even a little sleepy. “Tell me about how she loved her boy.”

For some reason this makes me chuckle and I don’t hesitate in my reply. “This boy was a little greedy for his sweetheart’s affection,” I tease, “but he had a right to be, I suppose, having loved her for so long. And his girl was shy,” I remind him, deliberately forcing myself to envision another, faceless Seam girl who must love Peeta Mellark with all her heart, “but _oh_ , how she loved him. When he returned from his terrible journey, weak and wounded but still so beautiful and wondrously, blessedly _alive_ , how she ached to bound to him and catch him up in her arms, to hug him breathless in her joy and relief and shower him with kisses!

“But of course, she could do no such thing,” I remind him – remind both of us, really. “For he had become so wealthy through his trials, like a miller’s son in an old tale, that this poor girl dared not even meet his eyes, let alone think about touching him.”

“But she did anyway,” Peeta insists, much like a rapt child listening to just such an old tale, and I smile.

“She thought – indeed, dreamt – of that and more,” I agree. “She imagined their home and their babes and – a-and the begetting of them,” I finish in a rush, because even though it’s a girl who might as well be imaginary – not me – that I’m talking about, or supposed to be, love-making is a mortifying topic, especially when you’re talking to the person you want to engage in it with.

My face burns like a coal but Peeta gives a soft grunt against my throat and nestles himself even snugger against me. “More,” he whuffles. “Tell me about the babies and where they would come from.”

In spite of myself and the grief this request should cause, I laugh aloud, because he sounds like a child wheedling for a continuation of his bedtime story, only the subject matter is rather more grown-up in nature. “Well, I suppose they would share a bed, as mothers and fathers are wont to do,” I tell him with teasing patience. “They would undress and lie down together, so closely that their bodies would…w-would fill each other’s empty places,” I say, stammering only a little. “And the emptiest place of all – the secret hollow deep inside the girl’s belly – he would seed like a garden with…w-with his love,” I forge on, fiery-cheeked and wholly out of my depth. “And from it the most beautiful blossoms would spring: blue-eyed sparrow-girls with skinny black braids and chubby dumpling-boys with golden curls and silver eyes.”

My womb aches again, empty and plaintive and almost _hungry_ for this future I’m painting for Peeta, and he sighs in echo of its silent pang. “So beautiful,” he murmurs sleepily against my throat. “Babies…such _beautiful_ babies… Lying with…m’ sweetheart and planting babies inside her…”

I can’t take it anymore.

I hook my right knee under his and give a firm tug. Peeta’s body is heavy but pliant in this drowsy state and he rolls a little up onto me, so his right leg – the precious, wounded one – falls between mine and his belly presses firmly into my right hipbone. It feels wonderful but insufficient, so I work my right leg up under his left and heft it inward as well, so both of his legs lie between mine.

The space between my hipbones gives a silent croon of pleasure, from my navel all the way down between my thighs, but it’s still not quite enough, and I hitch my pelvis against Peeta’s belly, as though I could simply scoop up this glorious mass of boy with that tiny cradle of bone and heft him just a little higher on my body.

He lifts his head with a strange garbled sound, halfway between a gasp and a groan. “Katniss, a-are you sure this is okay?” he croaks, his eyes wide and very awake. “I-I’m awfully heavy –”

“You’re perfect,” I assure him, because I’ve never felt anything half so wonderful as his warm weight over me, all boy-musk and pulses and quick soft breaths. It should crush me – or the breath from my lungs at the very least – having so much Peeta Mellark on top of me, but instead I want _more_ – all of it.

All of _him_.

I slip my hands into his back pockets, evoking a sharp gasp – unmistakable this time – and even wider eyes, and give an impatient tug at the stubborn bulk of his backside. “Scoot _up_ ,” I grumble, because I’d have a better chance shifting a boulder. “Tuck into me.”

He looses a ragged, shallow breath and gazes down at me for a long moment with eyes at once troubled and hungry and sad beyond measure. “You feel so _good_ ,” I whisper, suddenly sheepish, and ease my hands out of his pockets with a shamed wince. “I-I’m sorry if I –”

I have no idea how to finish that sentence – _If I made you uncomfortable? If I took advantage in some way?_ – but thankfully I never have to. Peeta dips his head to brush his nose against my cheek and with a minute surge from that powerful torso everything shifts an inch or two and he’s _there_ , right where I want him and covering me like a blanket, and this time the croon that escapes me is audible, half a mewl and half a moan. His face presses into the pillow above my shoulder with a deep lowing groan that I’d rather fell on my neck, but it’s a small price to pay to feel his groin nestled up against mine. The strange lump is harder than I remember from that blissful half-second in the snow; more rigid against me, somehow, but it feels even _better_ with the weight of his body behind it, butting heavily against the juncture of my thighs.

I can’t help wondering how it would feel if I wasn’t wearing this nightgown; if I was in trousers or leggings or underwear – _or nothing at all_ – and could curl my legs around his hips, pressing back against that exquisite hardness, and I bite back a cry at such an unworthy thought. Peeta’s selflessly given me yet _another_ wonderful gift; how dare I take it greedily and demand more? He can’t imagine how this feels or why I could possibly want it and yet he gave it to me anyway, despite his clear reservations.

I know I’ll never get this again – can’t ever,  _ever_  ask for it again – and so I resolve to make the most of it for both of us. It can’t feel much better to lie on your private parts, pressing them against a bony surface of someone else’s body, than to have that someone sitting squarely on top of them, so I bring my hands to Peeta’s back, thinking a hug or a little caress might help counter the discomfort. Only my hands aren’t content to be on top of fabric anymore, not after that wondrous accident earlier, and they slip beneath the hem of his shirt without hesitation, skittering about like ecstatic mousekins at the first touch of soft warm skin beneath.

Peeta moans against my ear and sinks over me, warm and heavy and limp with bliss.

I hadn’t realized, being on top of him for all that time this morning, just how wonderful it would feel to have him on top of me. How much freedom it would give me to touch, or how alluring the back side of his body could be. There’s so much of it that I can’t think where to start: his broad shoulder blades, the long groove of his spine, his downy nape…? Do I steal a hand – or both hands – away to bury in his crown of buoyant curls?

_Or could I simply take hold of the hem and drag it up over his head, to be engulfed in musky warm bulk and bare skin?_

I jerk my hands out from beneath his shirt with a terrified squeak because it’s back: that awful feeling from when I first marched Peeta up to this lover’s nest. Everything I’ve done so far has been innocent, if a little strange, but trying to pull his shirt off would be an obvious demand for something that will never,  _can_  never be mine, and the fact that I even thought to attempt such a thing in the midst of this exquisite interlude, however innocently, is so horrifying that I feel sick.

Peeta must feel it too, or something equally awful, because he scrambles off me so quickly that he almost falls off the sofa, his sleep-clumsied limbs tangling in bearskin and fox fur. He frantically rights the covers over me and clambers down to crouch beside the sofa with feverishly flushed cheeks and the most miserable expression I’ve ever seen on his sweet face.

This is it, of course. He has to send me away now, for groping under his shirt and making him lie so intimately over me. Why couldn’t I just hold him like I said and leave well enough alone?

“I’m so sorry,” he blurts, his breath short and ragged as though he’s just run the length of the Seam. “I shouldn’t have…have… _any_ of that.”

“But…you didn’t do anything,” I counter, too perplexed by his apology to temper my reply. “It was me, all of it. I can’t seem to stop doing bad things today.”

The misery fades from his expression, replaced by confusion and something like sadness. “Katniss, nothing you’ve done today – or _ever_ , that I can recall,” he says, “could possibly be construed as ‘bad.’”

I bite my lips together because him being nice – playing stupid, really – about it only makes me feel worse. “I keep doing these  _things_ , Peeta,” I whisper helplessly. “Things I don’t intend to do or even really understand –”

“And that makes them bad?” he wonders softly.

I cock my head like a bird’s, frowning down at him. What makes these things so terrible is that they’re lover’s gestures, another girl’s right and unwanted by Peeta…or  _are_  they?

He’s accepted all my kisses – even the ones on the mouth – in the contexts of playfulness and comfort and has yet to shrink from my touch; could it be that none of this feels loverlike to him? He’s an affectionate boy to begin with, and he’s been isolated in this fairytale house in the woods for so long that he feeds and befriends everything in sight. Could it be that this gentle, lonely boy drinks up my touch with the same bliss as I gobble up his? That he felt even half as much pleasure at my hands on his back as it felt to have his bare skin beneath my fingers?

I sit up a little, eyeing him like a nearly-tamed fox: wary and tenuously hopeful. “ _Aren’t_  they bad?” I croak.

His sadness vanishes, snuffed like a candle flame, and a whisper of a smile tugs at his sweet mouth. “Only if…if  _you_  don’t like it,” he says quietly. “Every touch from you feels like a blessing, but I would never want you to feel obligated or uncomfortable.”

I sit up fully, gazing at him in disbelief, and reach for his left hand where it lies against the bearskin. “ _Blessing?_ ” I echo, carefully curling my fingers around his, and his smile glows into fullness, spreading across his face like a sunrise as he turns his hand beneath mine.

“Blessing,” he confirms, stroking the back of my hand with his thumb, “of the most wondrous variety. The sort given by good fairies at a christening, without merit or recompense of any sort.”

“I-I wouldn’t say without recompense,” I fumble out,  _or for that matter, without merit,_  I add silently, because if anyone is deserving of comforting touch it’s Peeta Mellark, and receiving his touch in return is a tenfold – no,  _thousandfold_  – reward. It’s like giving someone a pebble and receiving a palace in return.

This time it’s Peeta who’s confused, tilting his head in puzzlement at my words, and I want so badly to kiss him that I just do it, leaning forward to take his curly head in both hands and planting my lips squarely against the crown. “Touching you – and being touched by you in turn – feels like  _home_ ,” I murmur against his scalp. “I could never hope to earn such a comfort, let alone dream of paying it back.”

He leans back just enough to meet my eyes, so slight a movement that it doesn’t even shift my hands from their gentle anchors on the sides of his head. “I thought we were past earning and paying back,” he says softly, but he doesn’t sound upset or troubled in the least. He sounds curious, tender…hopeful, even, but in a deep, almost  _hungry_  sort of way.

“I sincerely hope we are,” I whisper, because there’s no way I could ever even  _begin_  to rectify the debt between us.

“Then could you please hold me a little longer?” he whispers back. “Because it feels so good to be in your arms that it  _hurts_  to be like this, so close and so far apart all at once.”

“ _Does_  it?” I rasp, because it’s excruciating on my end. It hurts more than I would ever have dreamt the absence of something could. My body aches everywhere, as though I’m being pulled constantly and inexorably by a strange sort of gravity, only that force is pulling me toward Peeta, not the earth, and every moment that I hold myself back from him is like trying to stop yourself from crashing into the earth in a freefall from a tall tree. I feel empty and cold and almost incomplete, as if anytime I’m not physically in contact with him, I’m missing pieces; crucial pieces of my heart and lungs and even that profound, elusive thing my father called a soul, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever be whole again. Touch, however tender and affectionate, is fleeting, even shallow in its comfort. I feel like I need Peeta  _inside_  me – his warmth and musk and gold flooding that heavy, pulsing hollow at the root of my belly that aches worst of all – to ever truly quench that hunger; that desperation for wholeness, and the impossibility of that is heartbreaking, even terrifying.

“If-If you don’t want to –” he wavers, but there was never any shadow of hesitation in my body or my mind. I kick back the furs and tug him up beside me, immediately climbing into his lap and winding myself around him like a particularly affectionate snake; arms snug around his neck and legs knotted about his waist, and squeeze him so hard that he whimpers.

_Mine mine mine mine mine._

“Katniss,” he rasps, slipping his arms about my waist in turn. “C-Can you –?”

“ _Yes,_ ” I sigh into a faceful of downy curls, sinking down onto him and rocking him up against me all at once. “ _Anything._  Just name it.”

He shakes his head against my throat. “Never mind,” he says, “I…it-it’s stupid –”

“Tell me,” I murmur, gently prodding his head with my chin like an insistent snout, and I feel him concede.

“Can you…c-can you put your hands on my back again?” he whispers. “I-If you want to, I mean. It felt...nice.”

My breath skitters out in elated disbelief. I want to lean back a little, to find Peeta’s eyes and confirm what I think he just asked, but we’re so entwined that it would be like hacking a honeysuckle to pieces just to peer at the oak beneath, and just as painful to both parties.

So instead I curl a handful of shirt at his nape, gently tugging upward, and bring my other hand to the small expanse of bared skin above his waistband. Peeta moans at the touch; a deep hollow sound, at once sated and plaintive, and that’s all the confirmation I need to bury both hands beneath his shirt, palms soaring greedily over the powerful planes of his back.

“Sogood,” he groans, his head sagging heavily against me. “Feels _so_ good, Katniss.”

“I’d better keep up with my tanning, then,” I jest weakly. Between warm, downy skin beneath my hands and my legs wrapped around Peeta’s waist, my nightgown bunched up around my thighs with barely a fold of flannel between the pulsing cleft of my groin and the enticing bulge of his, I feel tight and breathless and on the verge of a strange and glorious shatter. “Callused huntress fingers won’t feel half so nice,” I croak.

“Agreed,” Peeta murmurs, startling me in the midst of my euphoric haze. “They’ll feel  _twice_  as good.”

I give a little yip of dismay because this isn’t the time or the way to tease me and force myself not to whip my hands out from exactly where they want to be, like I would under any other circumstances. “Don’t make fun of me, Peeta,” I say, stilling my swirling fingertips against his skin, and butt my jaw against his crown for emphasis. “Please don’t.”

“I’m not,” he says – no, _croons_ , the words hot and hushed against my throat. “Oh Katniss, I would never. Didn’t I tell you? Ganders are especially fond of dusky little vixen-toes, and lonely ganders fondest of all.”

“I thought you were teasing then too,” I grumble, but with no fire whatsoever. “Or that you wanted to nibble my toes for a joke.”

Peeta chuckles softly, a deep husky sound that makes something curl in my belly. “I’ll happily nibble your toes – both fore and hind ones – for any reason, or none at all,” he informs me. “I would never joke about something so important.”

Of course, this only serves to prove that he _is_ kidding, about all of it, and yet somehow, impossibly, I don’t mind. I rock back a little and nuzzle at his curly head till we’re aligned, brows to nose tips, and sigh across his lips. “Silly gander,” I tell him, combing my fingertips gently over his ribs. “My fat, foolish, golden goose: this is no good; no good at all.”

“What’s no good?” he wonders, tilting his head delicately to pip the very tip of his nose against mine, and the drowsy contentment in his voice melts my resolve like sunlight on a honey-pot. “Tell me what you want and you’ll have it, vixen mine.”

 _I want_ you _!_ cry my heart and my hot, hollow belly all at once. _I want your downy warmth over me, bare and musky and pressing into me with gentle eagerness, and your babes –_ oh, _how I want your babes, be they furred or feathered, hooved or human-kind._

_I want you all, and all of you._

“I-I mean,” I fumble out, “this business of cuddling is wondrous fine, but we’ll never get anything done if…i-if we keep carrying on in such a fashion.”

He tips his head back to meet my eyes, his own heavy-lidded with sleepiness and sheer bliss, and smiles slowly. “And what else is there,” he wonders, “my stubborn little songbird, that so presses on our time at this moment? We have enough food to outlast a month-long blizzard without ever stinting on portions, and I can make fresh bread and cakes at the drop of a hat. What am I forgetting?”

I press a small, measured kiss to the tip of his nose. “Your birthday, gosling mine,” I reply simply. “And presents, the making of which may require the full use of dusky vixen paws.”

At these words he whirls us about so quickly that my back is against the sofa almost before I’ve blinked. I’m curled like a kit between his radiant warm bulk and the back of the sofa, with my cheek on one sturdy shoulder and a mound of silky furs tugged hastily over us both. “Time for sleep,” grunts the soft mouth against my forehead, with no little amusement and so much affection it blinds me, even with my eyes closed tight. “No more leisurely cuddling, you lazy thing, just a quick fortifying nap. I want a whole heap of birthday presents made by crafty vixen paws,” he murmurs gleefully.

I chuckle against his chest, my heart so swollen with love that the happy jostle of laughter almost hurts. “Yes, greedy gander,” I reply meekly. “Though it might help if I knew how much time I have to work on said presents.”

Peeta makes a strange little sound; a sort of whine, almost, and I lift my head to find him regarding me with lips pressed firmly together, as though he’d rather admit anything in the world than the answer to my question. “If your birthday is in June, I will eat you here and now,” I inform him. “You may be the most precious thing in the world to me, but no present I can dream up would require six months of abstaining from cuddling.”

He grins crookedly. “It’s March, actually,” he says. “March 19th.”

I exhale in a little huff, somewhere between disappointment and despair. My sweetheart’s birthday is a yawning _two and a half months_ away. Closer to two than three, maybe, but June was a joke: March 19 feels like an eternity from now. I’m not sure I can hold onto the deerskin that long, but that’s not the worst of it.

Before I can stop myself, my eyes drift to the jar on the low table: the jar full of red ribbon scraps that Peeta can’t possibly have spotted yet. I promised no more kisses till his birthday; how in the world will I suffer through two and a half _months_?

“Is that a problem?” he wonders softly. “We can celebrate my birthday whenever you want, Katniss – or skip it entirely, really; it’s not a big –”

I dip my head to brush a swift feather-kiss across his mouth and quickly burrow against him once more, my burning face buried in his shirt.

“Ah,” he says, and one big gentle hand cups the back of my head. “I’d call you a thief, scamp,” he murmurs tenderly, caressing my scalp with his fingertips, “except you are so _fiercely_ determined to give, not to take.”

 _If you only knew,_ I think miserably. _How greedy I am to touch and kiss any part of you, and your lips most of all. How happy I am to gobble up your kisses like stolen toffee buttons._

I _am_ a thief, and the very worst kind: stealing kisses and embraces that belong to another girl – and a Seam girl at that, as like me as can be imagined. How would I feel to learn another Seam girl had been kissing and cuddling Peeta while he waited for my heart?

I press my face hard against his chest with a sharp, hopeless whimper.

“Shh, little one,” Peeta soothes, curling his body to form a nest for mine and fitting snugly around me, guiding my face to rest against his throat and scooping his knees beneath my backside.

For the first time it occurs to me how vulnerable he’s made himself, this gentle boy: persistently presenting his bare throat to a fierce and deadly vixen.

 _I might nip you,_ I warned him earlier, as he held me so tightly in the snow.

 _I love it when you’re fierce,_ he replied, _and love it even more when you nip me._

I wonder how my father would feel about this method of taming, and if the prince in the old tale ever tried this approach with his fox.

“You’re _safe,_ Katniss,” Peeta murmurs, a sweet hum against my face as he gathers me to him. “ _Home._ Warm and protected and…and cared for, treasured, _cherished,_ so very much. Tell me what’s making you sad and I’ll fix it,” he says huskily. “I promise. I can’t bear it when you’re sad.”

I shake my head against him because the last thing I can do right now – no, _ever_ – is tell him why it hurts to be in his arms, let alone dare to hope he could “fix” the problem. “I _can’t_ ,” I whisper. “It’s not something you can fix anyway.”

“I can try,” he reminds me gently, and I have to swallow a whimper as his fingers inch up to caress my nape. I want to lean back into the touch and bring those fingers to my lips all at once, and I don’t dare do either one.

“I hope someday you _can_ tell me, little sweetheart,” he says, stroking his chin against my head and tucking me a little closer against his throat, as though he heard the cry I didn’t utter. “That you’ll trust me with the deepest, most painful burden of your heart. I’d do anything to take it from you,” he whispers. “Anything to stop you from hurting.”

I know he’s telling the truth and that makes it even worse. This sweet boy practically lives to ensure my comfort and it’s probably driving him out of his mind that there’s a hurt he can’t heal – can’t even reach – but it wouldn’t help anything if I told him. He’s not going to love me just because I wish that he could, but he’d probably try to find some way to make me happy; give me all the trappings of a sweetheart and none of the love, perhaps, and break his own heart in the process.

So I give the only I answer I can. “I hope someday I can tell you too,” I whisper back, and sink into his solid warmth with a bittersweet sigh.

Peeta echoes it, and almost at once his breath slows to a content and steady pattern of long and deep. He’s so tired and so overdue for his nap that I’m a little surprised it took him this long to drop off, but just when I’m certain he’s out he murmurs, softly but clear: “Thank you, Katniss…for everything. For your songs and for the cuddle-nest, for the wonderful breakfast and…a-and the kisses and…the story about my sweetheart. Thank you for…for…” His voice breaks but in a long, determined yawn, not hesitation. “For hope,” he says simply; sleepily, and with a little croon of breath he drifts off beneath me, his powerful body limp and heavy and blissful in slumber.

I smile and tuck a shy kiss into the hollow of his throat. “Thank _you_ , sweet boy,” I whisper, and settle down to dream against his shoulder.


End file.
